The city had learned to live without Ethan.

His name no longer appeared in financial columns. His face was absent from boardrooms, charity galas, and late-night strategy meetings whispered behind glass walls. For months, Alyssa had convinced herself that this silence was safety—that Ethan’s disappearance had drawn the last sharp blade away from her throat.

She was wrong.

The morning it happened, the sky over the city was pale and merciless. Alyssa stood alone in her office, forty floors above the streets, staring at a skyline she now ruled. The empire was stable. Profitable. Fearful in the way only well-trained power could be.

And yet something in her chest felt…...