That was the part that still cost me: not that he had failed the test, but that I had genuinely hoped he would pass.

People imagine revenge as a warm thing, a fire you sit beside.

It is not.

What I felt watching that feed was closer to the cold that comes after a fever breaks — the body’s relief that the danger has passed, threaded through with the exhaustion of everything the danger cost you.

I did not pity Corvin.

He had earned every box on that sidewalk, and I would not insult my own two years of hope by pretending the man who priced my welcome at three thousand dollars deserved to keep the empire he’d built on borrowed ground and borrowed arrogance.