A year later. The city still moved the same way. Fast. Indifferent. Endless. Morning traffic flooded the streets below towering glass buildings while financial reports shifted markets before sunrise and executives rushed into meetings believing urgency made them important.
Some things never changed but Adrian had. The apartment he lived in now was quiet. Not empty. Just simple. Smaller than the house he once believed defined success. Smaller than the offices where he once thought authority belonged to him but for the first time in years, nothing around him existed to maintain an illusion. And strangely, that brought peace he would never have recognized before.
The headlines about Carter Holdings had changed over the months. At first, the media treated Elena’s rise like a shocking corpora
