**ELENA’S POV**
The words hit me so hard my mind refuses to accept them.
Adrian is free.
Everything inside me shuts down. My breath stalls in my throat. My feet stop moving. The world narrows to a sharp, ringing silence that swallows Damian’s office whole. My vision blurs at the edges as if someone has turned the lights too bright.
I stare at him, unable to process anything beyond that single impossible truth.
“No,” I whisper. “No. That has to be a mistake. Some kind of system glitch.”
Damian shakes his head once. Hard. No hesitation. No hope of misunderstanding. “It is real.”
The certainty in his voice punches the air from my lungs.
He moves quickly, opening drawers, pulling documents into a sleek black folder, sliding encrypted drives into his coat pocket. His movements are sharp
