For months Marius had chosen Sena over the woman who had built his entire life — had believed, in his vanity, that a twenty-six-year-old strategist from a rival empire wanted him for himself.

I had known better for exactly as long as my investigators had, and there had been nights I’d nearly told him, nearly warned the man who was quietly destroying me that he was being destroyed in turn.

I never did.

Not out of cruelty, but out of arithmetic: a man cannot be warned out of a delusion that flatters him.

He had to learn what Sena was the way everyone learns it, at the worst possible moment, with the cameras running.

And now he was learning it.