He looked, in that moment, less like a villain than like a man who has walked confidently through a door he has used a thousand times and found, on the other side, no floor.

I felt many things looking at him.

Pity was not among them.

But I understood, at last, that I was not watching a powerful man be punished.

I was watching an ordinary, frightened man discover that he had never been as powerful as he thought — that the whole edifice had been a loan, and the loan had just been called.

Chapter 15 — Sixty Percent