Chapter 75: A Throne That Will Never Be Full

The city moved beneath him like a breathing thing, alive and endless, filled with ambition, hunger, desperation, and power—the same power that Kian Vale had spent years carving into his own image, the same power that had once belonged to men who had tried to crush him and failed. He had outlived them all. Mercer. Foster. Nathan Hale. Lucian Voss. Names that had once meant something, names that had once held weight, but now? Now they were nothing but echoes, distant whispers of men who had made the mistake of thinking they could stand against him. Kian had turned them into ghosts, had erased them so thoroughly that soon, no one would even remember they existed at all. And yet, as he stood in his penthouse, whiskey untouched in his hand, staring out at the empire he had built, he felt that familiar pull—the quiet, creeping realization that no matter how much he took, no matter how many enemies he eliminated, it would never be enough.