The victory was that I got my life back, and I did not waste it guarding his ruin.

Chapter 27 — In the Light

It is three years later, and I am walking the floor of Ardent Global’s newest logistics hub, a bright, humming cathedral of automated lines and rolling freight doors, flanked by my directors, checking the metrics on a new sorting system that runs, as everything I own runs, on my father’s quiet elegant code.

I don’t wear the steel band anymore.

I wore it when I needed the world to see the armor; I don’t need it seen now, because it isn’t armor anymore — it’s just the shape of me.

Marius I hear about only rarely, and only secondhand: a man somewhere across the city, paying down an honest debt in honest installments, living a small and ordinary life that is, by every account, more peaceful than the glittering one he stole to get.