Chapter 11 · free to read
Nobody voted for me. Three exhausted houses simply could not agree on anybody else, and a man everyone half-trusts is the only kind of peace this city sells.
She taught me my father's empire the way you teach a child to swim, by holding my head under it.
He said it as a warning. He watched me the way a man watches an investment mature. With him I could never tell which one he meant.
No letter. A key, and four words in my mother's hand: 'Behind him, not beside.' She had left me an inheritance far more dangerous than money.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.