He was completely, utterly broken.
When he saw me walking toward him, flanked by security, his bloodshot eyes watered. He looked at my pristine white coat, at the massive steel letters spelling my name on the wall behind me.
“Clara… please,” Thomas whispered, his voice trembling with a pathetic, raw desperation. He took a hesitant step forward, but the security guard put a hand on his chest, stopping him. “Clara, I’m your father. I… I made a terrible mistake. I was blind. But I’m destitute. The bank is taking my apartment tomorrow. Just… just sign a single recommendation letter for me. Introduce me to Elias Thorne. You have so much power now, so much influence. Please, save my life.”
I stopped a few feet away from him. I looked at the man who had pushed me into the freezing rain, who had tried to steal my mother’s legacy to build a TikTok studio. I searched my heart for a flicker of anger, or perhaps a lingering drop of hatred.
I found absolutely nothing. Only a cold, clinical, profound indifference. He wasn’t a monster anymore. He was just a sad, irrelevant man.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” I said softly. My voice was calm, steady, and utterly devoid of empathy. I purposefully used his first name, drawing an immediate, unbreakable boundary between us.
His face crumbled at the sound of his name on my lips.
“But as you once told me,” I continued, tilting my head slightly, “when you’re in the presence of greatness, you have to get out of the way. You have to let the real achievers have their moment.”
I didn’t wait for a response. I didn’t need to see his tears. I simply turned my back on him. I walked away, my white coat billowing slightly, passing through the secure glass doors of my laboratory, leaving him standing completely alone in the cold, unforgiving lobby of the empire I had built without him.
As I sat back down at my desk, exhaling a breath I felt like I had been holding for twenty years, the silence of the lab was broken.
My secure personal phone chimed with an incoming, encrypted international call. The caller ID flashed briefly: Stockholm, Sweden.
I picked up the receiver, my heart suddenly hammering against my ribs. I pressed the phone to my ear, listening to the heavy, prestigious, accented voice of the chairman of the Nobel Committee’s selection board.
