I watched him walk that gauntlet, and I thought about all the ways a person accumulates the kind of silence that met him at those doors.

Because it does not happen all at once.

For three years, Lucan had been building it without knowing — every time he humiliated a subordinate in a meeting, every time he took credit for an engineer’s work, every time he killed something good to make a number look better, every cruelty he handed down believing that his position made him untouchable.

The people absorbing all of that had said nothing, and he had mistaken their silence for acceptance, even for respect.

It was neither.

It was fear, and fear is a debt that comes due the instant the power holding it in place is gone.