Chapter 4 - The Annihilatio
The grand ballroom under the towering glass dome was staggeringly opulent. Giant, tiered crystal chandeliers refracted blinding, kaleidoscopic light across the room. The air was thick with the clinking of crystal champagne flutes and the heavy scent of Tom Ford and Baccarat Rouge. The absolute, undeniable cream of New York society had gathered here.
However, the atmosphere was incredibly strange, almost suffocatingly tense. No one dared to speak above a hushed murmur. The eyes of every billionaire, senator, and tech mogul kept darting nervously toward the far end of the hall, toward a set of massive, heavy double oak doors adorned with gold ornamentation.
It was the only entrance to the ultra-VIP inner sanctum. Rumor had it that Richard Sterling was currently in there, holding court.
Dragging Chloe inside, David cranked his neck like a lost tourist in Times Square, trying to spot businessmen he could suck up to. But within minutes, he noticed something was horribly wrong. The partners and suppliers who used to speak to him, even if only out of obligatory politeness, were now backing away from him as if he were actively radiating nuclear fallout.
“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.”
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.
“Second: I demand that before sunrise, you call in all of Thorne’s debts. I want to see the news of the total bankruptcy and liquidation of the Thorne Group on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal.
“Third,” I swept my gaze over the two pieces of bloody garbage on the floor. “This man and this woman. If I ever see them on any street in New York again, I will not hesitate to destroy your businesses as well.”
Boom.
These three edicts meant absolute capital punishment. They didn’t just strip David of his money. They erased him from society.
“Understood, Madam! Have no doubt! That bastard will be left without the shirt on his back!” The bankers breathed a sigh of relief and turned to look at David with the eyes of hungry wolves.
“Security! What are you waiting for? Throw this trash out on the street!” a banker yelled.
The massive security guards rushed in, grabbed David and Chloe by the scruff of their necks, and began dragging them toward the exit.
“No! Kate, you can’t be this cruel! I’m Lily’s biological father! Let me see my daughter!” David thrashed in hysterics, squealing like a slaughtered pig.
“Shut him up,” I frowned in annoyance.
A guard unceremoniously drew his baton and drove it with maximum force directly into David’s solar plexus. David gasped, spat out stomach bile, and curled into a ball.
They were just about to drag them out when suddenly—
“Stop! Who dared to touch my son?!”
A shrill, hysterical screech rang out. Martha Thorne, with a bandage on her head and a still-swollen cheek, shoved her way through the crowd, bursting into the hall like a rabid dog protecting its pup. Lacking VIP status, she had been waiting in the driver’s lounge, but hearing the commotion, she ran over.
Seeing her adored son being dragged across the floor while I stood in the center surrounded by billionaires, her tiny brain finally short-circuited.
“Kate, you cursed witch! You bringer of bad luck!” Martha flopped her behind onto the marble floor and threw a classic temper tantrum, rolling on the ground. “Good people, look at this! This snake cheated on my son, and now she and her thug friends are wiping us out! Where is the justice?!”
Rolling on the floor, Martha suddenly caught sight of Lily being held by Richard Sterling. A light flashed in her greedy eyes. She leaped up and charged at the billionaire with a manic expression.
“That’s Thorne blood! That’s my biological granddaughter! You old geezer, give me Lily! Half the Sterling fortune is legally ours!”
She didn’t even get within ten feet of my father.
Arthur snorted coldly, made a sharp lunge, and planted his heavy Oxford shoe squarely into Martha’s chest. Like a kite with a snapped string, she flew backward and crashed directly into a long table holding a massive pyramid of champagne flutes.
Crash. Shatter.
Hundreds of crystal glasses exploded into dust. Elite vintage champagne cascaded down over her head like a waterfall. Shards of glass sliced her skin, mixing blood with alcohol, turning her into a pathetic, soaked scarecrow.
I slowly walked over to her, looking down at the mother-in-law who had tortured me for years, now choking on her own blood. The old woman scrambled backward in terror.
“Mother-in-law,” I smirked. From my limited-edition clutch, I pulled out a folder and whipped it violently across Martha’s fat face. “Wipe your dog eyes and read. This is the prenuptial agreement and the absolute waiver of parental rights signed personally by your son. From the second he put pen to paper, Lily’s last name became Sterling. You have absolutely nothing to do with her.”
I leaned down slightly, delivering an icy whisper. “You used to say I brought bad luck. Congratulations. You guessed right. Now take your bankrupt son and crawl back into your sewer.”
I stood up straight, brushing off my hands. “Throw them out.”
Martha Thorne was scooped up by the armpits like a bag of rotting garbage. Along with the half-dead David and the mutilated Chloe, they were disgracefully hurled out the doors of the Grand Aster Hotel, straight into the freezing New York night.
Silence fell over the hall once again. Only this time, woven into the silence was the primal fear of the young empress of capital. The corporate sharks understood clearly: after tonight, the balance of power in America had changed forever.
“Kate, darling,” Richard Sterling, rocking a sleeping Lily, walked up to me, immense pride radiating from his face. “We’ve swatted the flies. It’s time to get down to business.”
I turned around. The ice on my face melted into a dazzling smile. I walked up to my father, gently wiped a tear stain from Lily’s cheek, and turned back to the crowd of oligarchs frozen in awe.
May you like
I slowly raised a glass of champagne, assuming the posture of a true queen at her coronation.
“Gentlemen,” my clear, power-filled voice echoed under the dome. “Welcome to my gala.”
