I didn’t.

Not because he didn’t deserve consequences — he deserved every lawful one that came for him — but because I finally understood what my father had understood, and what Marius never would: that the person who spends her life standing over a fallen enemy to make sure he stays down has not actually left him.

She’s chained herself to him, given him a permanent room in her head, made his ruin the organizing principle of her days.

That was the one thing left that Marius could still take from me, and I refused to hand it over.

So I did the colder, freer thing.

I let the law hold the debt on its own terms, structured so that he would repay what he’d stolen through honest work over honest years, and then I closed the binder, and I stood up, and I walked out of that glass room without a backward glance — not to punish him, but because he had finally become what he always mistook everyone else for: someone beneath my notice.