Chapter 237

• I thought the meeting with Roman would be the last of the ghosts I needed to face, but I was wrong. His presence had been softened by time, marked by regret but no longer sharp enough to wound. Yet Alessia lingered like a shadow at the edge of everything, a weight that had not lifted even after her empire began to collapse.
• The message came quietly, not through headlines or investors but through a private channel. A short request, stripped of her usual flourish, asking if I would see her one last time. There was no promise of battle, no clever play hidden between her words, only a kind of fragility that I had never seen in her before.
• I sat with the message for a long time. Part of me wondered if this was another scheme, some final attempt to regain ground. But the tone was different, hollow where she once carried fire, and my instinct told me it was not strategy but surrender.