Chapter 294: A King Alone

The last of the town cars had pulled away from the curb, their taillights swallowed by the hungry night. The grand ballroom below was a silent, glittering wreckage of abandoned crystal and wilting flowers. The echo of the applause, the speeches, the seismic shift of power, all had faded into a ringing silence that settled deep in Davidson's bones.

He stood at the penthouse's wall of glass, the torch - his torch - laid atop the steel mantelpiece. Its mosaic surface glittered in the ambient light of the city, a cold, beautiful thing. Below him, New York was a sprawling circuit board of endless ambition, a kingdom he now officially, eternally, ruled.

And the silence was terrifying.

The thought came not as a shout but as a simple, devastating truth, settling over him like ash. Power costs love.

Of course, he had known this, in the abstract. He had calculated the price and itemized the losses on the balance sheet of his ascent. But in the triumphant roar of the gala, he had almost convince