It smelled, now, of fresh jasmine, and the clean breeze off the lake.

I walked to the sprawling glass window and looked out over the glittering expanse of Lake Michigan.

It was, I thought, the physical expression of everything that had happened, this transformation of a dark and airless room into one full of light and living things.

I had not merely taken Julian’s office.

I had remade it, cleansed it, turned the seat of his power into something that breathed.

And I understood, standing there, that this was what I intended to do with everything he had left behind: not simply to hold it, but to transform it, to take the empire he had built on cruelty and turn it, room by room and initiative by initiative, into something that gave life instead of taking it.