The silence in the penthouse after Peter left was deeper than any Akanbi had ever known. It was the silence of a vacuum, where the roar of his own need had suddenly been switched off, leaving only a hollow, ringing emptiness.
He walked to the bar, his hands trembling a sensation so alien it felt like someone else's body. He poured a brandy, but the smell of it, usually rich and comforting, now turned his stomach. All he could smell was the faint, clean scent of Peter's skin, mixed with the coppery hint of his own violent desperation.
He brought the glass to his lips but stopped. His lips still burned.
"How does it feel, Akanbi? To want a man so badly you have to try to steal a kiss from him like a thug in an alley?"
The words echoed, each one a needle driven into the heart of his carefully constructed identity. The player. The manipulator. The man who made others beg. He had been reduced to a common assailant, driven by a hunger so raw it stripped him of all finesse.
He threw the glass. It shattered against the window overlooking the lagoon, a spiderweb crack spreading across the unblemished view. The liquor dripped like tears down the glass.
He had won. By every metric of his world, he had won. Peter was ruined, isolated, publicly shamed, and financially doomed. And yet, standing in the wreckage of his victory, Akanbi felt only a profound, sickening loss. He had exposed the core of his obsession, and Peter had looked at it and called it pathetic. That judgment, from the one person whose opinion had come to matter in this twisted game, was a defeat no amount of money could reverse.
His phone buzzed. It was Rachel, probably wanting a debrief, to be praised for her part in the ruin.
He didn't answer. The thought of her, of any of them the interchangeable women, the sycophants, the business rivals filled him with a new kind of disgust. They were props. Peter had been real. And he had rejected the stage entirely.
Akanbi sank into a chair, head in his hands. The obsession hadn't broken; it had mutated. It was no longer about possessing Peter. It was about erasing that final look of cold, pitying triumph from Peter's eyes. He had to make him see that he wasn't pathetic. He had to… he had to make him understand.
But how do you make a man who values his freedom above survival understand you, when your only language is possession and destruction?
For the first time in his life, Akanbi Onobanjo had no plan.
Peter didn't feel triumphant. He felt scraped raw. The taste of Akanbi's violence the brandy, the rage, the violation of the kiss lingered like a stain. He scrubbed his mouth again with his sleeve in the elevator, his whole body trembling now that the adrenaline was fading.
But beneath the revulsion, there was a hard, small coal of certainty. He had seen the monster unmasked. And the monster had flinched.
He went to Fess's.
Fess opened the door of his small flat in Yaba, took one look at Peter's torn shirt, hollow eyes, and raw lips, and pulled him inside without a word. He made strong, sweet tea and listened as Peter spoke in a flat, exhausted monotone not about the kiss, but about the exile, the lie, the ultimatum.
"So what now?" Fess asked, his face grave. "You can't stay on the run. And you can't fight him with fists. He's a system."
"I know," Peter said, staring into his tea. "I have to let him do it."
"Do what?"
"Ruin the business. Everything. Let him think he's won."
Fess stared at him. "Have you gone mad? After all this, you'll just let him?"
"He's already won the battle he was fighting," Peter said, the strange clarity still holding. "The battle to own me, to break my spirit. I won that one. So now, I have to lose the war he doesn't even know he's fighting."
"Which is?"
"The war for my soul," Peter said softly. "If I run, if I fight him on his terms with money or lawyers I don't have, I'm still playing his game. If I let it all burn, and I stand in the ashes and I am still me… then I'm free. And he has nothing."
It sounded like madness. It sounded like saintly foolishness. But looking at Peter's eyes, Fess saw no madness, only a weary, unshakeable resolve. He'd crossed a line tonight, and there was no going back.
The fallout was swift.
Within a week, as Akanbi's silent, furious machinery ground on, the loans for Emmanuel & Sons' next shipment were mysteriously delayed. A key client canceled a long-standing order, citing "reputational concerns." Michael, trying to hold the crumbling pieces together, was a ghost of himself. He didn't call Peter. The lie had become the truth in his mind, a wall between them.
Peter got a job. A real one. Through a friend of Fess's who asked no questions, he started as a junior logistics assistant at a small, struggling freight company in Apapa. The pay was a pittance. The office was hot and loud. He wore cheap clothes. He took buses.
He was poorer than he'd ever been in his life. And for the first time since the crash, he slept through the night.
He knew he was being watched. He'd see a familiar black Range Rover idling near the bus stop sometimes. He knew reports of his mundane, hardscrabble life were going back to the penthouse. Let them watch. Let Akanbi see that the prince he'd tried to break was learning to be a pauper, and was, inexplicably, at peace.
One evening, three weeks after the kiss, Peter was walking home from the bus stop, sweating through his second-hand shirt, when the Range Rover pulled up beside him. The window slid down. It wasn't Akanbi. It was a driver he didn't recognize.
"Mr. Emmanuel," the driver said. "Mr. Onobanjo requests your presence."
Peter didn't stop walking. "I'm busy."
"He insists. He said to tell you… it's about a new proposal. Not about the past."
Peter almost laughed. A new proposal. As if the old one hadn't ended with an assault. He kept walking.
The car crawled along beside him. "He said you would say no. He said to give you this." The driver held out a plain white envelope.
Against every instinct, Peter stopped. He took the envelope, not from the driver's hand, but from the car's window ledge. He opened it.
Inside was not a letter. It was a single, glossy photograph. It was of his father, Chief Emmanuel, sitting on a park bench near the family home, head in his hands. He looked utterly defeated. The photo was taken that morning.
On the back, in Akanbi's precise, slashing handwriting, was one word:
"Enough?"
It wasn't a threat of new violence. It was a reminder of the ongoing, quiet violence Peter's defiance was permitting. Akanbi was saying, Your crown of ashes is paid for with your father's heart. Are you truly free?
The coal of certainty in Peter's gut cooled. He looked from the photograph to the driver's impassive face.
The war wasn't over. Akanbi had just changed tactics. He was no longer trying to break Peter's pride. He was trying to break his conscience.
"Get in," Peter said, his voice hollow.
He had won his freedom.
Now he had to decide if he could bear its price