She slipped out of my dorm with that same spoiled grace she always wore like perfume—soft waves cascading down her back, the faint echo of her giggle still staining the air. As if she deserved to laugh. As if she hadn't shattered something sacred and walked away without consequence. She smiled like she had the right to be happy. Like Christian's blood hadn't soaked the stone beneath her feet.

I wiped my lips—slow, deliberate—removing the last trace of her lipstick from my skin, smearing away the illusion of tenderness. It was nothing more than residue now, a symbol of what she gave me freely. Or thought she did.

Earlier that day, she'd mentioned her parents would be flying in from Warsaw for tomorrow's Winter Annual Charity Ball in Moscow. A harmless detail to her. But to me, it was the perfect stage—the grandest of curtains, beneath the brightest lights, in front of the most merciless audience.

I shut the door behind her, silence swallowing the room whole.

My steps toward the walk-in closet were slow, but purposeful. I opened the compartment hidden in the oak paneling and retrieved the camera—the same one I had set carefully days ago. No shakes in my hands. No remorse in my chest. Only precision. Only the rhythm of control.

At my desk, the laptop hummed to life, a quiet witness to the next act. I transferred the video file from the camera, watching her image flicker onto the screen. She looked soft there. Gentle. Open. The way she kissed me—the way she gave herself to me—was almost enough to make me hesitate. Almost.

If this were another life... maybe. If I didn't know what she had done... maybe. But I do. And love—if it was ever that—means nothing when weighed against a coffin.

Tomorrow, in front of the senators, the ambassadors, the old families and the blood-soaked empires—the Colombians, the Italians, the Kuznetsovs, the Karamazovs, the Achtenbergs, the Marinos, the Russos... And of course, us—the Vasiliev Montenegro. All of them will be there. Enemies and allies. Rivals with their champagne glasses and decades of grudges. And on the biggest screen in the ballroom, she will fall. They'll see her for what she is. What she did. What I made her into. The journalists will eat it alive. And for the first time, she'll feel what it's like to be destroyed. Beautifully. Publicly. Irrevocably.