---- Chapter 12 Desmond Day POV: My first attempt to fly to A-Country was a failure. At the airport, | was informed that a 'no-fly order had been placed on my passport, pending the results of the SEC investigation. Evelena Lindsey' s reach was long, her power absolute. | was trapped. | couldn' t reach Ariel. Her old number was disconnected. She had vanished from social media. | was a ghost to her, and she was a ghost to me. | called Evelena' s office a hundred times. Her assistant always gave me the same polite, impenetrable response: "Ms. Lindsey is unavailable." | was a king trapped in a crumbling castle. My company, once the darling of Silicon Valley, was now a pariah. No one would touch us. The new audit firms wouldn' t take my calls. Investors were threatening to pull their funding. My top executives, the brilliant minds | had poached from Google and Apple, were resigning in droves, rats fleeing a sinking ship. The day my company was supposed to go public, the day | was supposed to be crowned the new king of tech, | sat alone in my vast, empty office, a bottle of scotch my only companion. The NASDAQ billboard in Times Square, which ---- was supposed to be broadcasting my face, was instead showing an ad for a new brand of toothpaste. | had flown too close to the sun, and Evelena Lindsey had melted my wings. | drank until the world became a merciful blur. | ignored the calls from my board, from my remaining staff, from Aurora. | just sat in the darkness, the empire | had built with Ariel' s blood, sweat, and tears collapsing around me. Everything | had sacrificed her for was gone. And she was gone too.