The Inheritance Clause
About empire over love.
About the third option.
Both.
Freely.
"I think," Elena said, "that Victoria Ashford was the most extraordinary and most costly person I have ever met. I think she spent sixty years building something magnificent and understood, at the end, that the magnificence had cost her everything she had not intended to give." She paused. "I think she found me and brought me into the empire not because she wanted me to run it forever but because she needed me to prove that it could be run well — and then she needed me to be strong enough to put it down." She paused. "I think what she wanted to give me was what she never had herself." She held the young journalist's eyes. "The cho