He said you would never forgive us for what you knew about him anyway.

I am sorry.

I am so sorry.’

Zeun sank into a chair, hands clamped over her ears.

‘You all said it so many times I started hearing it as truth,’ she whispered.

‘I knew it was wrong.

I knew.

But I couldn’t think when everyone kept telling me she hated me.’ Her gaze finally found Madam Su’s face, and whatever she saw there made her start to cry harder.

Su Hayan tried one last performance.

He stepped toward Madam Su with outstretched hands, as if private remorse could erase public evidence.

‘I was desperate,’ he said.

‘The company was bleeding.

Investors were circling.

Lin was a mistake that got out of control.

I never meant for Nari to die before you came home.

I can fix this.

We can fix this.’

Madam Su stared at the man she had spent almost three decades holding upright.

Then she looked at the guests, the lawyers, the board, the screens, the daughters, and the woman in white who had worn her life like a costume.

‘No,’ she said.

‘You can answer for it.’

That was the moment the police entered.

Neil had delivered the reopened evidence package to prosecutors hours earlier.

Two detectives approached Hayan and Lin Maja with the efficiency of people who preferred paperwork to spectacle.

Fraud, conspiracy, evidence tampering, subornation of perjury, unlawful transfer attempts, tax crimes, document forgery.

Each charge landed like a hammer on glass.

Hayan kept insisting there had been a misunderstanding.

Lin Maja kept crying that she had only done what love demanded.

Neither sounded convincing anymore.

Before they were escorted away, Madam Su gave the board the final piece.

Blood Phoenix had spent the previous six months purchasing distressed Su Group debt through intermediaries, tracing stolen funds, and consolidating enough voting power through her unrelinquished shares and Nari’s restored estate to force an emergency leadership change.

Hayan was removed as chairman that night.

His accounts were frozen before midnight.

The legal ending took months, but the moral ending had happened in the ballroom.

Madam Su’s conviction was formally vacated and then erased.

The court issued a full acquittal after reviewing the preserved footage, the tampered access logs, and sworn recantations from Jene and Zeun.

Hayan received a prison sentence for fraud, conspiracy, and witness manipulation.

Lin Maja received one for false accusation, fraud, and participation in evidence destruction.

Hansang lost her executive role and was sentenced after pleading guilty to tampering and financial misconduct.

Jene cooperated and received probation with mandatory public testimony.

Zeun entered long-term treatment and, for the first time in years, spoke without someone scripting her guilt.

Madam Su did not make a spectacle of revenge after that.

She made arrangements.

She finalized the divorce.

She sold the city penthouse Hayan loved, liquidated the vanity projects Lin Maja had funded with stolen money, and restored the workers’ pension accounts he had quietly raided.

She cut away the rot beam by beam.

The tabloids wanted fury, but what they got from her was precision.

Only once, several weeks after the acquittal, did she allow herself to grieve without witnesses.

She drove to the lakeside house Nari had left her, a modest cedar place with a deep porch and wind