The days that followed were a waking nightmare, a seamless fog of legal consultations, media ambushes, and the suffocating silence of his once-gleaming penthouse. Adrian Thorne, the man who had been on the cover of *Wired* just a month ago, was now a pariah, a ghost haunting the ruins of his own ambition. He’d see his face on television, a grim-set mask of a man, juxtaposed with a softly lit, smiling photograph of Elara. They called her a visionary. They called him a monster. They weren’t wrong.
He moved through the motions of his defense, listening to his lawyers speak of mitigation and plea bargains, but the words were just noise. The real trial was being held in the court of his own memory, and the verdict had already been delivered. Every night, he’d close his eyes and be back in the
