Are you enjoying wine with your lover, darling? I hope so, because I’ve just frozen your credit cards and that bottle will be the last thing you buy with my father’s money.

It was a portrait of the life he was supposed to have—the wealth, the family, the legacy. Everything was right there.

Elena looked up and their eyes met. Her expression didn’t change. There was no anger, no triumph, no gloating.

Only indifference.

She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger who has walked into the wrong room. Then she pressed a button on the rail of her hospital bed.

Two large security guards turned the corner behind Julian.

“Mr. Thorne,” one of them said, placing a heavy hand on Julian’s shoulder, “you’re violating the restraining order. You need to leave.”

“I just… wanted to see her,” Julian whispered, the teddy bear slipping from his hand onto the floor.

“She’s not yours, Julian,” Magnus said, stepping forward, his voice low. “Biologically, perhaps. But legally? You’re nothing more than a donor who defaulted on his payments.”

Julian was escorted out of the hospital, pushed back into the biting cold of a New York winter. He stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the glowing window of the maternity ward.

Only then did he realize he hadn’t just lost a game.

He had been playing checkers, while Elena had been playing three-dimensional chess.

He had underestimated the quiet woman who tended the garden, never realizing she had been patiently digging his grave the entire time.

He pulled his collar up against the wind and walked toward the subway—

the King of Nothing.

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