He slowly stood up straight, holding Lily securely with one arm.
I stepped forward from the end of the human corridor. The sound of my heels—click, clack, click, clack—was sharp and rhythmic on the marble. But to the ears of David and Chloe, it sounded like the Grim Reaper sharpening a scythe on a tombstone.
I was no longer looking down. My graceful neck was held high like an empress descending from the heavens. I looked at this farce with an icy gaze filled with merciless contempt. I walked right past the groveling David and stopped in front of Richard Sterling.
Father and daughter looked at each other for ten long seconds. Those ten seconds encapsulated six years of separation, endless pain, humiliation, and hidden fury.
“Dad,” I parted my red-painted lips. My voice carried clearly so that every single person in the massive hall heard it. “I’m back.”
Boom.
If Lily screaming ‘Grandpa’ was a bomb, the word ‘Dad’ was a magnitude twelve earthquake, grinding entire cities into dust.
The hall erupted. Convulsive gasps could be heard from everywhere. Some of the weaker businessmen simply slid to the floor, leaning against the buffet tables for support.
The very woman David and Chloe had been dragging through the mud, calling her social trash and a homeless beggar, was the sole, ultra-secretive heiress to the trillion-dollar Sterling empire.
Under the monstrous cognitive overload, David’s sanity finally snapped. He leaped up from the floor like a raving lunatic, pointing a trembling, sweaty finger at me.
“Kate! What kind of sick play are you putting on?!” he screamed hysterically. “You’re an orphan who didn’t even finish college! I picked you up off the street! You’re a maid who washed my socks for six years! Who the hell gave you the right to call Mr. Sterling your father?! Are you insane?!”
He was speaking absolute gibberish. He completely refused to accept reality. If I was truly Sterling’s daughter, then what were those six years of his power over me? His cheating, his abuse, his arrogance? It turned him into the most pathetic, insignificant idiot in the history of humanity.
“Shut your mouth.”
Arthur, the elderly British head butler, stepped sharply forward from the shadows behind my father. He didn’t even dirty his hands. He simply slammed the brass tip of his cane hard against the floor.
Dozens of tactical elite guards materialized instantly. The black muzzles of assault rifles and crackling stun guns simultaneously aimed straight at David’s head. If he twitched, he’d be turned into a sieve.
Arthur stared coldly at David like he was inspecting a crushed cockroach. “David Thorne. Rub your pathetic dog eyes and look closely. Standing before you is the primary heiress of the Sterling Holdings conglomerate, and the shadow founder of the world’s largest investment fund, Miss Catherine Sterling.”
Arthur’s voice rang with cold steel. “Six years ago, for the sake of so-called love, she refused to reveal her identity to marry you. Mr. Sterling, in his fury, cut off all her funds, hoping poverty would bring her to her senses. But we never could have imagined that your family would not only fail to appreciate her, but would allow some cheap escort to beat the bloodline of the Sterling family.”
Every word struck David’s face like a brutal slap.
“And by the way,” Arthur sneered, “did you really think the freezing of your pathetic little millions today was an accident? Did you think you earned all those fat government contracts your little firm got over the last few years? That was our Madam secretly tossing you scraps from the Sterling table! Spoon-feeding you! Because on your own, you are a hopeless, talentless piece of garbage!”
Arthur raised his chin. “And now, Madam has opened her eyes. She has taken back everything that belongs to the Sterlings. You and your Thorne Group are just a pile of rotting trash that even a stray dog wouldn’t piss on.”
Those words permanently trampled the last remnants of pride in David’s soul. His vaunted business talent. His pride as a self-made man. It was all my charity. He was a clown wearing a paper crown in a sandbox, while I commanded the ocean.
“No… I don’t believe it,” David grabbed his head in agony, staggering backward, howling like a beast caught in a bear trap.
I didn’t even grace him with a look. I turned and took an exquisite velvet tray from Arthur’s gloved hands. Resting on it was a unique, flawless blue diamond the size of a quail egg—the legendary Star of Manhattan, the absolute symbol of the matriarch of the Sterling family.
Arthur respectfully fastened the necklace around my neck. The deep blue radiance instantly illuminated me, elevating my already terrifying aura to an untouchable height.
The transformation from abused housewife to business empress was complete.
I slowly turned my head. My warmthless eyes, like two poisoned blades, stabbed into Chloe, who was sitting on the floor, unable to even squeak from animal terror.
“Didn’t you say you were from a noble family?” My voice was low, but the hall’s acoustic system helpfully carried it everywhere. “That you were David’s golden ticket into high society?”
I raised a hand clad in a black lace glove and snapped my fingers.
Whoosh!
A giant LED screen above the stage flared to life. The hotel’s promotional reel vanished. In its place appeared a highly detailed, classified dossier complete with photographs. At the very top was Chloe’s face before plastic surgery—flat, provincial, and rough.
“Chloe. Or according to your birth certificate, Crystal Jenkins,” I read aloud, my tone dripping with boredom. “You didn’t even graduate high school. You worked in cheap massage parlors in Florida. Three years ago, using money squeezed from elderly sugar daddies, you flew to Miami and LA, where you had twelve plastic surgeries. You returned, bought a fake degree online, and started playing the role of an Instagram model and high-end escort.”
With every word I spoke, the slides on the screen changed, displaying undeniable proof. Chloe on the operating table. Receipts for the fake degree. Disgusting, explicit photos holding her driver’s license. All this filth put on full display in front of the entirety of New York’s elite.
Chloe’s face twisted in agony. She wanted to scream, to deny everything, but she was in the photos. There was nowhere to run.
The corners of my lips curved into a supremely cruel smile. “And that’s not all. During the months you slept with David, you didn’t just drain three hundred thousand dollars in jewelry out of him. You secretly forged his signature as a guarantor to borrow five million dollars from the Russian mob at astronomical interest rates. And literally this afternoon, those thugs walked into the Thorne Group offices with a contract to seize the building.”
Those words were the final concrete slab dropping onto David’s coffin.
He slowly turned his head and stared at Chloe writhing on the floor. There was no anger left in his gaze. It was the primal hatred of a man who had been skinned alive. This was who he left his wife for. This was who he watched knock his daughter’s teeth out for. A heavily indebted escort with a fake face who had strapped him with millions in mafia debt.
A horrifying, inhuman shriek ripped through the air. David lunged at Chloe like a rabid boar.
He grabbed her expensive hair extensions and literally ripped her off the floor, swinging his massive hand with all his might.
Smack. Crack. Smack.
Crushing, annihilating slaps rained down on Chloe’s artificial face like a hurricane. First strike: the corner of her mouth tore, blood spraying. Second strike: her freshly reconstructed nose shattered with a sickening crunch, sliding to the side of her face. Third strike: false eyelashes ripped off, along with a chunk of skin.
“You lied to me! You destroyed my life! Give me my company back! Give me my daughter back!” David roared as he beat her, his tears mixing with snot.
He looked simultaneously pathetic and repulsive. He wasn’t avenging his daughter at all. He was just taking his rage out on his own blindness, his animal terror at losing his wealth. He hoped this bloody vigilante justice would show the Sterling family his remorse.
Chloe dangled in his hands like a broken rag doll. Blood mixed with dermal fillers splattered in all directions.
“Enough!” My icy voice cut through the chaos just as Chloe was nearly beaten to unconsciousness.
David froze, his hand stopping in midair. He dropped Chloe, turned his face—covered in someone else’s blood—and crashed down at my feet again, desperately slamming his forehead against the marble.
“Kate! Kate, forgive me! I was wrong! It was all her! She seduced me! In my heart, there was always only you and Lily! Look, I avenged our daughter! Forgive me just this once! For the sake of our six years of marriage!”
“Marriage?” I leaned down slightly, looking at the face I once loved, which now provoked nothing but nausea. “David, from the exact second you stood there in cold blood, watching my daughter’s teeth get knocked out… you became nothing more than a corpse to me.”
I slowly stood back up. My icy eyes swept the hall and landed on a group of men in bespoke business suits in the front row who were trembling violently.
“Mr. Diamond. Mr. Solomon. Mr. Gorman.” I precisely named them. The heads of the largest creditor bank, the main supplier, and the primary distributor for the Thorne Group shuddered. Stumbling, they rushed out of the crowd and bowed before me, nearly folding in half.
“Listening, Miss Sterling! Give the order. It will be done!” The lead banker wiped the sweat from his forehead with shaking hands.
I looked down at them and handed down the death sentence.
“First: from this second forward, the Sterling conglomerate and all affiliated entities indefinitely terminate any and all cooperation with the Thorne Group.
