Chapter 8 - The Price of Pride
The fire was the final nail in Greta’s coffin, but for Tristan, it felt like the snuffing out of a candle he had been forced to carry for too long. In the sterile holding room of the police station, he sat across from Greta one last time. She was handcuffed, her face stripped of all makeup, her hair wild.
"Why?" she whispered, her voice a hollow shell. "Why did you have to destroy everything? We could have been a dynasty."
Tristan leaned forward, his hands clasped firmly. "Because, Greta, you never understood the value of a single thing. You thought the fountain was a place to discard people. You thought money was a tool for erasure. Everything you touched, you tried to make smaller so you could feel taller. I didn't destroy you. I just stopped holding you up."
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He stood to leave, but he stopped at the door. He felt a sudden, crushing weight of exhaustion. He had spent years—first fighting to climb out of the slums, then fighting to keep the elite from pulling him back down. His soul felt as cold and hard as the marble fountain that had started it all. He realized that in his quest to punish Greta, he had become the very thing he despised: a man who measured his life by his enemies' failures.
He left the station and walked into the rain. He didn't go to his office. He didn't check his stocks. He drove to the neighborhood where he grew up, the place of rats and broken streetlights, and sat on the curb of the old laundromat. He cried, not for the lost trust fund or the broken engagement, but for the boy who had lost his innocence in the pursuit of a crown that turned out to be made of lead.
