Constantine stood alone in his lamplit study, Helena's feverish letter in one hand, the impossible cold iron nail in the other. For decades, he had believed the world to be a closed system, ruled by the mechanics of power and ambition. Every calculation, every plan, was shaped by a mind sharpened by two lives-his own, and that of Alistair Finch, a man born a thousand years in the future. To Constantine, history was an equation, politics a game, and gods little more than variables to be counted or discarded.