There is a version of me that died on a terrace six years ago, in front of an entire pack, in front of the man who was supposed to choose me. I let her die. I buried her quietly, the way you bury anything you can't afford to keep feeling. I built something else in her place. Something sharper. Something that doesn't flinch when powerful men walk into a room like they own the air in it. But there is one truth I never buried. One truth that has been growing, patiently, for six years, waiting for the exact moment it would walk into a boardroom on its own two feet and look Dane Kestrel directly in the eyes. His eyes. I always knew this day would come. I never let myself imagine what he would do once it did. Some debts do not stay buried. Some marks do not stay unclaimed forever. He is about to learn that the woman he rejected was never the ending of his story. She was the beginning of a reckoning he never saw coming.