A month passed. Or maybe it was a century. Time, for a spirit, is a fluid thing, measured not in the ticking of a clock but in the slow, grinding erosion of earthly things.
The first thing to go was the name. I watched from across the street as workmen on a scaffold pried the gleaming chrome letters—V-A-N-C-E—from the facade of the obsidian tower my mother had built. Each letter, as it was lowered to the ground like a fallen soldier, sent a tremor through the city's financial district. The fall of an empire, televised not on the news, but in the quiet, brutal efficiency of a liquidation.
The Kronos deal, the masterstroke of Seraphina’s long-game revenge, had been a poison pill wrapped in the veneer of a merger. The debt covenants were a time bomb, and Liam had eagerly pressed the detonat
