Chapter 9
Simon gestured sharply to the four armed security guards.
“Guards! Restrain her! Call the precinct commander immediately. I want this fraud taken out in handcuffs through the front lobby, where the press can see exactly what happens to those who try to swindle the Kingsley family!”
The four guards unclasped their batons and surged forward across the flagstones, their heavy boots ringing against the limestone.
Trevor’s eyes blazed with intoxicating, demonic triumph.
He took two aggressive strides toward Daphne, leaning over the champagne table. He raised Daphne’s laminated hospital pass high in the air, his lips curling back from his teeth in a snarl of absolute, merciless contempt.
“Did you really think you could escape your station, Daphne?” Trevor hissed, his voice slicing through the winter terrace like a whip. “You are a pathetic, fraudulent nobody! You reek of bleach and failure, and you will rot in a prison cell where you belong!”
With all the force of his bitter, accumulated spite, Trevor forcefully hurled Daphne’s hospital pass onto the champagne table alongside the side-by-side printout of the French influencer, screaming:
“Take her down! Drag this lying bitch out in chains!”
The guards stepped forward, hands outstretched.
The high-society guests sneered in vicious disgust, drawing back their furs to avoid being brushed by an interloper.
Daphne stood utterly frozen on the terrace, tears burning like hot acid against her cheeks, her breath caught in a strangled sob as the entire world collapsed inward upon her. She looked at the handcuffs, looked at Trevor’s sneering face, looked at the sea of aristocratic eyes judging her unworthiness, and every instinct screamed at her to turn and run into the blackness of the night—
“Take one more step toward her,” a voice sliced through the grand hall, “and you leave this city in ruins.”
The voice didn’t roar.
It was neither frantic nor raised.
It was an absolute, terrifying decree of pure, arctic death. It carried the chilling, crushing weight of an avalanche, cutting through the terrace with such lethal, subterranean authority that the four security guards stopped dead in their tracks, their boots freezing against the stone as if paralyzed by an unseen blade.
The entire terrace plunged into a dead, suffocating silence.
Slowly, deliberately, the man whose arm had been shielding Daphne released his hold on her waist.
He turned.
He stepped out of the deep shadow of the colonnade, walking two paces into the blinding, crystalline glare of the overhead chandelier.
The golden light broke across his face.
The sharp, aristocratic jawline. The cold, merciless steel of his slate-gray eyes. The tailored midnight tuxedo with the unmistakable platinum Kingsley cufflinks catching the blaze of the chandelier.
Nathan Kingsley.
The absolute master of the empire.
In the doorway of the terrace, Director Sterling dropped his champagne flute. The crystal shattered violently against the marble floor, the golden liquid splashing across the skirts of three society matrons, but not a single person looked down.
Every senior director, every trustee, and every private guard in the pavilion turned ashen, sickly white.
“M-Mr. Kingsley...?” Director Sterling choked out, his knees visibly trembling.
Trevor Evans froze.
The triumphant sneer on Trevor’s lips died instantly, replaced by a look of sheer, paralyzing horror so absolute that the breath choked in his windpipe. The color drained from Trevor’s skin until he looked like a corpse standing under the terrace lights.
Beside him, Simon Kingsley’s arrogant smirk melted into a look of staggering, nauseated panic.
Nathan Kingsley didn't spare the shivering directors a single glance. He didn't look at the shattered crystal, nor did he look at the photos of the French influencer lying on the table.
His slate-gray eyes, burning with a murderous, unholy wrath that promised the total annihilation of every career in the room, fixed entirely upon Trevor.
Then, slowly, without breaking eye contact with the trembling manager, Nathan reached out his right hand, gently wrapping his warm, protective fingers around Daphne’s shaking, iodine-marked knuckles.
