---- Chapter 23 Hamilton Glass POV: | saw the news of Dante Mullen's proposal on a cheap tablet in a dimly lit bar halfway across the world. The pictures were splashed across every celebrity news site. Dante, kneeling on a beautiful terrace. Anya, looking regal and beautiful, her son playing in the background. The story was a fairy tale. The brilliant, wronged heroine, finally finding her true prince. My hands shook as | scrolled through the photos. | felt a familiar, acidic burn of jealousy in my throat. But underneath it, there was something else. A quiet, resigned sadness. He was a good man. He was worthy of her. He would give her the life | should have, the life | had been too blind and too weak to build. | kept scrolling, desperate for the inevitable "She said yes!" headline. But it never came. Instead, the follow-up stories were about her rejection. A gentle, respectful rejection. They quoted anonymous sources from the party who described her speech about building her own legacy, about being her own hero. | leaned back in my chair, the cheap liquor in my glass ---- untouched. She didn't need a prince. She had become the queen of her own goddamned kingdom. | laughed. A dry, humorless sound that drew a strange look from the bartender. Of course she had turned him down. Why would she trade her empire for a partnership? She wasn't a piece on the board to be married off for a strategic alliance. She was the one who owned the board. In that moment, | finally understood. My love, my grandfather's manipulations, Dante's adoration... we were all just footnotes in her story. The real story was about her. The brilliant mind, the unbreakable spirit, the ghost who came back from the dead to build a better world. | thought back to that day at the tech conference, watching her on stage. The power, the confidence, the sheer, blinding brilliance of her. She hadn't just beaten me. She had transcended me. She had risen to a level | could never hope to reach. | finally let her go. Truly. The obsession, the regret, the desperate need for a forgiveness | knew | would never receive... | let it all dissolve. My penance wasn't to chase her ghost for the rest of my life. It was to live with the knowledge of what | had lost. It was to stand on the ground, forever looking up at the star | had once held in my hand and let slip through my fingers. | paid for my drink and walked out into the humid night. For ---- the first time in years, | didn't know where | was going. And for the first time in years, it felt like freedom. Anya's story had its happy ending. It just didn't have me in it. And that was exactly as it should be.