Chapter 918: A $85 million Beautiful Reason Why

Forty-seven floors above Hollywood Boulevard, two men were laughing like they’d just robbed a casino and the house was still counting chips.

Gerald Ashworth—silver-haired, mid-sixties, founder of

Ashworth-Mead Pictures—sat

behind his corner-office desk with a scotch in one hand and a signed contract in the other, shaking his head like a man who’d just found a winning lottery ticket in the pocket of a coat he hadn’t worn since the Clinton administration.

Beside him, Dominic—Gerald’s son-in-law, VP of Development—was doing the math on his phone and cackling harder every time another zero registered.

$85 million.

That’s what the kid had paid.

A teenager

.

Walked into their office three hours ago with a woman who looked like she bench-pressed Buicks for cardio and another who looked like she’d been 3D-printed in a law firm’s future wing. Sat across from Gerald with the posture of someone ordering coffee and said, calm as death:

"I want the Celestial Widow."

The Celestial Widow—

their dead project. Their graveyard IP. Gerald’s daughter Eziel had written the original screenplay

—

a cosmic revenge saga about a goddess whose divine husband is murdered by the pantheon, who descends to the mortal world wearing his power like stolen armor, hunting the gods who betrayed him with a wrath so pure it could sterilize stars

.

Two years of

Eziel’s

life. Seven drafts. Shelved because the character mirrored an existing

Marvel

property too closely.

Every studio they’d pitched had said the same thing:

too close, too risky, dead on arrival, please leave through the service exit.

And this kid bought it. Not optioned it. Not licensed it.

Full IP acquisition

—the character, the screenplay, all associated materials, all derivative rights, sequel and remake rights, adaptation rights across all media, ancillary market rights, merchandise licensing.

Everything. Outright purchase. No partnership. No backend deals. No ongoing relationship. Clean transaction.

Money for paper. Goodbye.

Their legal team had drawn up the rights purchase agreement in under an hour. The kid didn’t even negotiate the purchase price—no floors, no ceilings, no percentage-of-budget calculations.

Just a flat $85 million

wire transfer for an IP they’d valued internally at zero. No option period. No development contingencies.

No reversion clauses. He owned it. Fully. Permanently.

The pre-production materials—concept art, storyboards, character designs, three drafts of a shooting script—were included in the sale. Development notes. Market research. Everything

Ashworth-Mead

had invested before shelving the project. All of it transferred to Carter Entertainment, a company Gerald had never heard of until today.

"Eighty-five million," Gerald said, refilling his scotch with the reverence of a man pouring

holy water.

"For the Widow."

Dominic grinned so wide his face looked like it might split. "Kid’s got more money than brains and worse taste than a trust-fund art collector."

Gerald raised his glass. "To rich teenagers with bad investment strategies and apparently zero legal counsel."

They clinked like men who’d just sold a haunted house to someone who thought ghosts were a feature.

Six floors below, his daughter—also Dominic’s wife—screamed a name that wasn’t Dominic’s.

And outside—hovering in the sky beside the glass tower, invisible to every mortal eye, wings spread against the smog-stained California sunset—

Seraphiel

watched.

She had descended into the mortal sphere seventeen minutes ago.

The sensory assault had nearly undone her. Sound crashed like breaking oceans. Smell clawed at her golden nostrils—

exhaust, fried food, perfume, fear, lust, ambition

, all braided into a choking tapestry.

The sheer density of mortal existence pressed against her divine form like gravity turned hostile, trying to crush divinity into meat.

She’d compartmentalized it. Filed it. Adapted.

She’d found him through resonance. His

power signature

lit up the spiritual spectrum like a bonfire soaked in napalm—a pulse of corrupted energy so intense that tracking it required no effort at all. She’d followed it here.

To this glass tower.

To this city of beautiful

liars.

She hovered now—wings spread wide, golden primaries burning with celestial flame that bent light around her like a cloak of living dawn, invisible behind the shimmering veil that separated seraph from sinner.

The glass wall of the

forty-first

floor was three feet from her face.

And through it, she could see

everything

.

He’s young.

That was the first observation. Not clinical or detached. A blade of recognition that sliced clean through her immortal composure.

The Voice had spoken of an ancient evil. She had expected something that looked like what it was—old, scarred, crowned in shadow.

Instead—a boy

.

Mortal frame. A face that registered as anomalous on her divine senses—too symmetrical, too precise, radiating something her goddess categorization couldn’t fully parse because it refused to be categorized.

He was inside a woman. The act of corruption in progress.

Seraphiel observed the mechanics with the detached precision of a general studying enemy tactics through a scope—except this scope was trembling.

A single luminous

tear

slid from her left eye. She did not wipe it. Did not acknowledge it. It traced its familiar path—down her cheek, along her jaw, falling into the mortal air where it evaporated before reaching the street forty-one floors below.

A seraph’s involuntary response to

witnessing profanity

. Nothing more.

And yet it burned.

Power signature intensifies during physical contact.

She observed. His hands moved on the woman’s body. Every touch landed with inhuman accuracy.

Not random. Not instinctual. Targeted.

As if he could perceive something invisible that guided his fingers to exact locations—pressure points, nerve clusters, the hidden architecture of pleasure and surrender.

Sensory ability. Reads the body’s architecture. Tactical advantage—he knows where to strike before the target knows she’s vulnerable.

The woman’s biological responses were accelerating beyond normal parameters. Heart rate spiking. Perspiration blooming. Muscular contractions rippling in waves that should have taken minutes, not seconds.

Something was amplifying the response. Something in his touch itself.

His physical form shifted subtly during the act—micro-adjustments that her divine perception caught even if mortal eyes couldn’t. Shape. Angle. Dimension. Calibrating in real-time to maximize effect on the mortal insides.

Adaptive physicality. The body reshapes to fit the sin it’s committing.

The woman screamed. The sound carried through the glass, through the air, through the thin membrane between mortal and divine perception. An orgasm—the spiritual shockwave of it rippled outward and brushed Seraphiel’s golden aura like a lover’s breath on sacred skin.

The woman was weeping now. Clinging to him. The Prince held her—steady, unhurried. His power signature hadn’t diminished. If anything it had deepened. Fed by the act. Strengthened by it.

He feeds on the exchange. Each encounter increases his baseline. This is not recreation—it is

cultivation

. He grows stronger every time.

Six floors above, two men laughed and drank.

Unaware.

The Prince’s corruption signature now

permeated

the forty-first floor like a stain—thick, warm, settling into the walls and furniture and air. It would linger. Any woman who entered this office in the next several hours would feel it.

Wouldn’t know what they were feeling. Would just feel...

restless. Wanting

. The corruption spreading passively, without intent, without effort—like perfume nobody could name but everyone could smell.

Seraphiel had seen enough.

The

Prince himself was dangerous

. Young. Growing. Unaware of her existence.

Good.

That was an advantage.

Seventeen minutes on Earth.

She folded her wings once—silent, deliberate—