Take what’s hers.” He leaned across the table and told me I would be nothing without my father, and I stood up, because that was the one thing I would not let stand unanswered — not for my sake, but because it was exactly backward.

I did not stand to defend my pride.

Konstantin’s opinion of me had ceased to have any weight the moment I saw the document under the certificate.

I stood because you would be nothing without your father was the precise lie I had spent three years disproving, and I was not going to let it be spoken in that room as if it were true — because there were people at that table, young people, staff, who needed to hear it corrected.

The world Konstantin came from believed that worth was conferred: that it flowed down from names and fortunes and fathers, that a foster girl was nothing until a billionaire made her something, that I was simply a vessel my father had filled.

And I had built my whole adult life as a living argument against that belief.