Jonas broke in at last. “And yet you’re here.” He leaned forward, hands clasped so tight the knuckles had gone pale. “You’re sitting in my apartment saying all this. So answer the obvious thing, Elias. If it ran away, if the brake didn’t take, if you lost control—how are you here now?”

Liora looked between them, the investor in her fighting with plain human unease. “That is the only question that matters at this stage.”

Dev shook his head once. “No. Another matters too. Whether any of this is true, or whether I’m watching a man in shock build a story around a breakdown.”

Amara had not taken her eyes off Elias. “Let him answer the first one.”

Elias lifted the glass again and found it empty. He set it down carefully. His hands had steadied only because they had gone numb with fatigue. Outside Jonas’s windows, traffic moved in clean lines between towers, all of it bound to ordinary time, obedient and blind. The sight of it made his throat tighten.

“You’re asking from the wrong end of it,” he said.

Jonas frowned. “Then give us the right one.”

Elias looked at him, then past him, to a place no one else in the room could see. “I’m here now because what happened after the loss of control did not end there. That was only the beginning.”

Silence settled hard over the room. Even the building seemed to hold still around them.

When Elias spoke again, the words came slower, each one laid down with effort, as if he were stepping back onto a surface that had already tried to throw him off.