The novel's pages played in his memory like a cruel echo. Eight months—just eight months. That was all it had taken in the story for Lucian Blackwell to fall from grace to utter ruined.
It hadn't been Clara's anger that destroyed him, nor the directors' disdain. Those were consequences, not causes. The true spark had been Seraphina.
In the original novel, she had never once looked his way. From the very first chapter, her eyes had sought Julian Hart—the man the story had written as its sun. She had laughed at Julian's words, trusted his advice, leaned toward him in ways Lucian had mistaken for chance.
Lucian, blinded by longing, had chased shadows. Every step he took to prove himself, every reckless gamble, every stubborn insistence on standing in boardrooms where he was unprepared—it had all been for a woman whose heart had never been his to begin with.
When the contracts crumbled and the company slipped from his fingers, it was Seraphina's quiet indifference that cut the deepest. She hadn't betrayed him. She hadn't chosen Julian over him. She had simply… never chosen him at all.
And in that silence, in the realization that his ruin had been for nothing, Lucian had drowned himself in glass after glass, night after night.
Now, standing in the quiet of his office with the city lights scattered below like stars, Lucian closed the novel's memory with a faint, almost weary smile.
"Julian Hart," he murmured to the empty room, the name tasting bitter but strangely freeing.
Seraphina's story had never been his. And perhaps that was the only truth he needed to remember.