---- Chapter 11 Chapter 11 Aimee Ramirez POV: Clara walked into my office, her face a mask of professional neutrality. "He accepted the offer, Ms. Ramirez. He starts tonight." | nodded, my eyes fixed on the city lights that were beginning to bloom in the twilight. "Thank you, Clara." She hesitated at the door. "If | may be so bold, ma'am... why?" | turned from the window to look at her. "Because he needs to understand what it means to build something from the ground up. To scrub the floors, to clean the toilets. He flew too close to the sun, and he forgot what the ground felt like. I'm simply reacquainting him with it." It was a lie, of course. A clean, corporate-sounding justification for an act of pure, personal vengeance. The truth was uglier. | wanted to break him. | wanted to shatter his pride as completely as he had shattered my heart. | wanted him to see me every day, powerful and thriving, while he was on his hands and knees. | wanted him to suffer. That night, | stayed late, long after the last employee had gone home. From my office on the top floor, | watched the security monitors. At precisely midnight, | saw him. He entered ---- through the service entrance, dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting gray janitor's uniform. He looked like a ghost haunting the halls of his own past. He pushed a cleaning cart, his movements slow, mechanical. He cleaned the glass doors he had once strode through like a king. He emptied the trash cans of the executives he had once commanded | watched him for hours, a strange, cold fascination gripping me. This was the man who had dismissed me as "emotional." The man who had called our life together a "temporary maneuver." Now he was cleaning up other people's messes for minimum wage Around 3 a.m., he made his way to the executive floor. My floor. He paused outside the boardroom, the scene of his downfall, and stood there for a long moment, his head bowed. Then he came to my office. He opened the door slowly, as if expecting me to be there. He walked in, his eyes taking in the changes | had made-the new art, the different furniture. He walked over to my desk and gently touched the back of my leather chair. The chair he used to sit in. His shoulders began to shake. He buried his face in his hands, and a raw, silent sob wracked his body. | sat in the darkness of my penthouse, miles away, watching him on the monitor, and | felt a flicker of something. It wasn't pity. It wasn't satisfaction. It was a cold, clinical curiosity. | had broken him down to his component parts. Now | ---- wondered: what, if anything, would be left to rebuild? The experiment had just begun.