“Arthur! Arthur, hello! It’s me, David Thorne!” David stepped toward a major real estate magnate, extending his hand with a fawning, desperate smile.
Arthur’s face twisted in sheer horror. He physically jumped back three steps and barked, “I don’t know you! Get the hell away from me!” He then hastily vanished into the sea of bespoke suits.
David’s hand hung awkwardly in the empty air. Cold sweat began to pool at the base of his spine. What was happening? Had the rumor about his frozen assets already spread through the elite gossip mill?
“Davey, look who got in,” Chloe suddenly yanked his tuxedo sleeve hard, pointing a manicured finger back toward the ballroom entrance.
I slowly walked into the hall, Lily clutching my hand. Under the blinding crystal lights, that minimalist black velvet dress suddenly began to radiate such an overwhelming, magnetic aura of a true queen that the dense crowd involuntarily parted.
They created a wide, silent corridor just for me. Every single gaze in the room instantly locked onto my face.
David’s panic and animal fear at being shunned instantly mutated into absolute, blinding rage. It’s this loser, he rationalized wildly. It was definitely because of my “poverty-stricken aura” that everyone was avoiding him.
“You actually dared to drag yourself in here?!” David charged forward to intercept me, acting like a rabid dog protecting its territory. “Are you trying to completely destroy my life?! Security! Where is the internal security?! Throw this uninvited trash out!”
His roar sounded disgustingly sharp and entirely out of place in the sophisticated quiet of the ballroom.
“Throw her out! She doesn’t have an invite! Homeless trash!” Chloe jumped up and screeched, her voice grating against the ears of the aristocracy.
But the internal guards, armed and stationed around the room, merely cast a cold, dead-eyed glance at David. They didn’t even twitch a muscle toward me.
I remained completely still. But within that stillness brewed an all-consuming, world-ending storm. I looked down at the two of them like they were jumping, pathetic court jesters.
But exactly at this wire-taut, explosive moment, Lily’s fragile psyche broke.
Days of relentless fear of the evil woman who struck her, the terrifying, massive crowd of staring strangers, and finally, her own biological father screaming at them like a vicious demon—it completely shattered the five-year-old girl.
“You’re bad! You’re bad!” Lily suddenly burst into hysterical tears. She violently tore her hand away from mine and, like a terrified, blinded fawn, sprinted away. She ran blindly into the deepest part of the hall, straight toward those heavy oak VIP doors that no one else even dared approach.
“Lily!” My expression shifted, my heart leaping into my throat.
“You little brat, where are you running?! Stop!” David didn’t even think to chase his daughter to comfort her. He just screamed viciously, believing the child was about to permanently humiliate him in front of his betters.
The elite tactical guards stationed at the VIP doors with assault rifles saw a figure running at them and instantly tensed. They crossed their tactical batons with a sharp metallic clack, blocking the path.
“Halt!”
Did a five-year-old girl understand that? She only knew that monsters were behind her, and she desperately wanted to hide. Squeezing her eyes shut, she barreled straight for the closed doors.
A guard’s eyes turned cold. He reached out a heavily armored arm to physically repel the child.
But in the exact millisecond before Lily would have slammed into the guard’s arm, the unbearably heavy oak doors—which seemed to divide two different worlds—creaked open from the inside.
The rich scent of expensive Cuban cigars and aged sandalwood flooded the hall. A massive, gray-haired man with the piercing gaze of a hunting eagle stepped over the threshold like an impenetrable mountain. He wore a bespoke dark burgundy suit. His eyes exuded the terrifying, crushing aura of a man accustomed to commanding the globe.
Lily couldn’t stop in time. She crashed full speed right into the old man’s leg.
“Oof!” the old man exhaled, looking down in surprise at the trembling, tear-soaked little girl clinging to his trousers.
At that moment, the entire grand ballroom plunged into a dead, icy silence. The collective breath of everyone present stopped.
It was Richard Sterling. The business emperor who managed trillions. The mythical titan whose mere tap of a walking cane could make Wall Street tremble.
David’s legs gave out. He nearly collapsed to his knees right there on the carpet. It was over. His feral daughter had just physically assaulted the richest man in the country. Forget the billion-dollar investments evaporating—the entire Thorne family would be wiped off the face of the earth by morning.
“Throw that brat to the dogs! Hurry!” David screeched hysterically at the guards, desperately trying to disown the child on the spot to save his own skin.
But in the next second, something happened that made everyone present question their own sanity.
The haughty, untouchable business emperor did not fly into a rage. On the contrary, his face—seemingly carved from arctic ice—melted instantly. Infinite pain, tenderness, and overwhelming love flooded his eyes. Completely uncaring about the tears and snot smearing his bespoke trousers, he sharply bent down. With those massive hands that had signed thousands of multi-billion dollar contracts, he pulled the little girl tightly to his chest.
“Grandpa!”
Feeling the profound warmth and ultimate safety of this embrace, Lily instinctively wrapped her small arms around his thick neck. Sniffling, she pointed a tiny, trembling finger back at David and Chloe, frozen in the distance.
She wailed at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing off the glass dome. “Grandpa! Daddy didn’t help me! And that bad lady hit me! She knocked all my teeth out!”
Boom.
It was as if a nuclear bomb had detonated in the dead center of the ballroom.
Richard Sterling snapped his head up. The tender grandfather vanished, replaced instantly by a blood-curdling, murderous intent. This thirst for blood, almost physically tangible, swept across the room and locked onto David and Chloe like a laser-guided missile.
“Who?” The old man’s voice wasn’t loud, but it rolled through the souls of everyone present like impending thunder. “Who dared to slap Richard Sterling’s biological granddaughter? Step forward.”
Dead silence. Thousands of New York aristocrats froze as if someone had hit pause on reality.
Granddaughter.
This secretive, legendary titan of the global economy had a five-year-old biological granddaughter out of nowhere? And she was right here, crying that her teeth had been knocked out?
Following Lily’s trembling finger, the gazes of the entire crowd converged on David and Chloe like thousands of burning spotlights.
At that moment, David’s legs completely failed him. With a dull thud, his expensive Italian leather shoes hit the hard marble floor as he collapsed to his knees. He didn’t even feel his kneecaps crack. Only one thought spun wildly in his hollow head.
It’s over. This is impossible. It’s absolutely impossible.
How could this “dead weight”—the girl who, along with his submissive wife, was too terrified to even ask him for McDonald’s money—how could she be the granddaughter of the country’s ultimate billionaire?
“No, it’s not true. It’s a mistake. A monstrous mistake,” David babbled, crawling on his knees. He was shaking as if plugged directly into a live electrical socket. Heavy, cold sweat soaked his tuxedo. He swallowed desperately, his vocal cords emitting only a hoarse squeak.
Chloe took an even harder hit. Her face, slightly distorted from fresh fillers and Botox, turned as white as a corpse. All her arrogance, all her cruel contempt evaporated without a trace under Sterling’s abyssal gaze. Her stomach cramped, her legs gave way, and she simply crumpled to the floor next to David, her cheap rhinestones scraping pathetically against the marble.
“Mr. Sterling!” David crawled forward a few feet on all fours, raising his head like a stray dog dying of thirst. He stretched his lips into a smile that looked far worse than crying. “You… you must be mistaken! This girl’s name is Lily. She’s the daughter of my ex-wife. She’s a feral brat! How could she be your granddaughter? Kids are stupid! They throw themselves at anyone! I am so sorry. For God’s sake, I’ll take her away right now. I promise, I’ll break her legs at home as an apology!”
David didn’t even get to finish his sentence before the temperature in the hall dropped below absolute zero.
The way the magnates looked at him ceased to be the way one looks at a fool. They were looking at a rapidly decomposing corpse. To stand in front of Richard Sterling and say you were going to break his granddaughter’s legs wasn’t just suicide. It was jumping into a woodchipper and hitting the ‘ON’ button yourself.
Richard Sterling didn’t even look at the groveling insect on the floor. His rough but powerful hands gently cupped Lily’s tear-soaked face. He traced the red swelling still visible on her cheek. When his gaze fell upon the missing milk teeth and the dried blood on her gums, the business lord’s eyes grew bloodshot.
“My sweet girl, don’t cry,” Sterling’s voice trembled with infinite pain and guilt. “Grandpa is here. Even if the sky falls, Grandpa will hold it up for you.”
