“Everything,” I said.
Juno’s smile was slow, devastating. “Then you’ll have it.”
We lay there in the dark, four equals, the city humming beneath us, the world outside still burning with the fire we’d lit.
None of us felt the need to say anything else.
EPILOGUE
Rowan
Six months later.
Two fiscal quarters. That was the deal.
I stood in the center of the Zurich command center, looking at the dashboard projected on the glass wall. The numbers were staggering.
Fifty employees.
Three hundred and forty million pounds in the industry reform trust, money we had extracted from Vance’s liquidity like a rotten tooth.
Two hundred and thirty companies certified under Safe Harbor.
We had built a regulatory empire out of a protest song.
"You’re staring at the settlement figure again," Stephen said, coming up beside me. He didn't touch me, not here on the floor, but he stood close enough that the scent of ink and expensive parchment drifted over me.
"I like the zeroes," I admitted. "They look like handcuffs."
"Better," Stephen corrected. "They look like consequences."
It was done. The consumer protection settlement had landed two months ago, triggering a cascade of compliance that hadeffectively rewritten the industry standard. The Designation Compliance Board had been stripped of its automatic contractual standing in three major jurisdictions. We hadn't just beaten Vance; we had deleted his methodology.
Vance himself wasn't in prison. He was in Dubai, or maybe the Maldives, living off whatever assets he’d managed to squirrel away. He was wealthy, sure. But he was irrelevant. Nobody returned his calls. His name, once a golden key that opened every door in London, was now toxic. We hadn't killed the man; we’d killed the brand. To a narcissist, that was a far crueler sentence.
"The Q3 relationship audit is due," I said, turning to look at Stephen.
Stephen’s grey eyes softened behind his glasses. "The calendar alert went off at 6:00 AM. I assumed you saw it."
"I marked it as 'Pending Investigation,'" I said.
"Investigation complete," he replied. "Let’s go home."
Home.
That was the variable I hadn't been able to account for in the spreadsheet.
For six months, we had lived the "ordinary" life Juno had insisted on. We had stripped away the crisis. We had stopped running. We had learned who we were when the world wasn't burning down.
I learned that Mateo cooked on Sundays, elaborate, slow-roasted things that filled the penthouse with the smell of rosemary and patience. I learned that Stephen read aloud in the evenings, usually dry legal briefs or architectural histories, his voice a low, steady drone that settled my nervous system better than any medication. I learned that Juno worked late and I worked early, and that our hours overlapped at 3:00 AM in the kitchen, a quiet, sleepy convergence of the Beta and the Omega sharing herbal tea in the dark.
We had argued about the temperature of the wine fridge. We had repaired a leak in the terrace irrigation system. I had created a color-coded calendar for our social obligations that everyone ignored except Stephen, who annotated it.
We had survived the boredom. And in the boredom, we had found the structure.
When we walked into the penthouse that evening, the air was different. It wasn't the frantic energy of the cabin or the sharp, metallic tang of the legal battles. It was solemn. Heavy.
Juno was waiting in the living room. He was wearing a tuxedo. Not the flashy velvet one from the Tate, but a classic, severe black cut that made him look timeless. Mateo was beside him, a mountain in charcoal wool.
