"Now we are here. And you’re pacing, and you’re calling it Julian’s fault, and you’re reaching for Leo and Amira like they’re lifelines when they are not lifelines, they are people who are currently watching you drown and making their own calculations about the cost of proximity."

"Demian..."

"I left everything," Demian said as if he was putting something down. Something heavy he had been carrying for a long time and was finally, finally setting on the floor.

"Do you understand that? I left everything here. To build this with you. I believed in you. I believed in what we were doing, I believed we were building something real, and I stayed when it was hard, and I stayed when it was ugly, and I stayed when.."

He stopped.

His jaw tightened.

When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, but it had not become less definite. If anything it had become more.

"She was too good for you," Demian said. "Amara. From the beginning. I watched you with her, and I watched you with Seren, and I watched you make one calculation after another about people who were not calculations, and I said nothing because you were my friend and because I thought..." He exhaled. Short. Sharp.

"I don’t know what I thought."

"Don’t do this right now," Seb said. His voice had changed. Not the executive register, not the man-in-control register. Something rawer underneath it. "Demian. Not right now."

"When?" Demian asked. Simply. "When would be better? When Creed Tech is gone too? When there’s nothing left to distract from the conversation?"

Seb said nothing.

"Read my lips," Demian said, and there was something almost sad in how he said it, something that had moved past anger into the territory beyond anger where things were simply true and simply finished.

"You lost her. Not today, not because of the result, not because of Julian Vale or the shares or any of the things you’ve been telling yourself are the obstacles. You lost her long before any of this."

He looked at Seb directly. Completely. The look of someone who had decided that honesty was the last thing they had left to offer.

"In fact, she was never really yours to lose. And somewhere underneath all of this, underneath the lies and Elara and Seren, you know that."

The office was very quiet.

Outside, the city continued its business. The financial feeds continued to update. Somewhere on a server, AP’s nine point three percent was doing nothing, simply existing, simply sitting in the register with the patient immovability of something that had been placed there a long time ago and had always known it would eventually be needed.

Seb stood in the middle of his office.

He looked like a man who had walked into a room expecting it to be one shape and had found it entirely another. Not destroyed exactly. Not collapsed. But fundamentally, irrevocably rearranged. The kind of rearrangement that did not go back.

"You’re my best friend," he said finally. Quietly.

"I know," Demian said.

"You can’t—"

"I can." Demian picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. Unhurried. The movement of someone who had made this decision before they walked into the room and was now simply executing it.

"And I am." He paused at the door. Looked back once not with hostility, not with satisfaction, with something that looked much more like grief.

"Your obsession with Amara has cost you everything worth having, Seb. Your company. Your dignity." He held Seb’s eyes. "Me."

He opened the door.

"I warned you," Demian said. "You’re a bastard when it comes to her. You always were. And I should have said it louder, much earlier, and walked out then." A pause. "I’m saying it now."

"You." Seb turned slowly. The grief of the closing door had lasted approximately four seconds before something else moved in to replace it, something uglier, something that needed a target and had found one. "You backstabber." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Demian stopped. He turned back around.

His face had the particular stillness of a man hearing something he had half expected and had decided in advance not to give the reaction it was fishing for.

"It could even be you," Seb said. "Behind all of this. Elav. The rumours. All of it." He heard himself saying it and some part of him, the small, diminishing part that was still capable of reason, registered that this was not a logical conclusion.

That it did not hold. That he was throwing something at a wall, not because he believed it would stick, but because the wall was there and he needed to throw something.

Demian looked at him for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost even the grief.

"I have worked here," he said, "for over a decade." Quiet. Precise. The way you spoke when you wanted every word to land cleanly.

"Over a decade, Seb. I built systems in this company that you didn’t know existed until you needed them. I sat in rooms and took the calls you didn’t want to take, cleaned up the situations you created, and then walked away from." His jaw tightened.

"I see this company as my own. Because in every way that actually matters, in every way that has nothing to do with whose name is on the founding documents, it is mine as much as yours."

Seb said nothing.

"So." Demian straightened. One small, final adjustment of his jacket. "If you’d like to believe I spent a decade building something I love only to destroy it from the inside, then you never knew me at all." He paused.

"Which I suppose is consistent with how well you know anyone who actually cares about you."

Seb’s mouth opened. "You’re fired," he said.

The words came out before the thought finished forming. The reflex of a man who had run out of every other kind of power and had reached for the only one still technically available to him.

Demian looked at him.

And then for just a moment, just briefly, something almost like a sad smile crossed his face. Not mockery. Not triumph. The expression of someone watching a person they once loved makes the last in a long series of choices that led to the same place.

"Enjoy your sinking ship," Demian said.

And walked out.