The articles filled in the details with a kind of clinical savagery. The stock, upon reopening, hadn’t just plummeted; it had evaporated. It lost ninety-eight percent of its value in the first hour of trading before being delisted. The banks had, as Marcus predicted, called in every loan. The dominoes fell with architectural precision. His personal fortune, so intrinsically tied to the corporate assets and leveraged against the value of my intellectual property, was wiped out. The penthouse, the fleet of cars, the private jet I was now using to escape him—all were seized by creditors.
I read about the dozens of half-finished skyscrapers, skeletal and silent, now monuments to his hubris across three continents. I learned that hundreds of subcontractors were suing for non-payment, and that
