Chapter 925: Cuckold and Furious Father

Dominic was breathing like he’d just done CrossFit for the first time, and his body was filing a formal, complete with emotional damages and a demand for hazard pay.

Wet hand still hovering. Chest heaving. Face cycling through colors like a mood ring having a seizure in the middle of a psychedelic crisis.

The whole office smelled like

sex

and the slow, theatrical death of a man’s ego—somewhere between a high-end perfume called

"Regret"

and the faint, unmistakable tang of a marriage that had just been publicly vivisected with surgical precision and zero anesthesia.

Somewhere in this building a janitor was going to find this room tomorrow and just...

quit.

Just keys on the desk, a long drive home, and a sudden,

burning desire to move to a monastery

in

Tibet

where nobody ever had sex on mahogany desks.

I didn’t even look at him at first.

I fixed my belt. Slow. Buckle through the loop.

The way you’d do it at home before grabbing cereal on a lazy Tuesday morning. Pure Tuesday energy.

Dominic’s whole identity just got

ctrl+alt+deleted

in front of a live studio audience and I was out here adjusting my waistband like I was about to check the mail or see if the pizza guy had arrived yet.

He wiped his hand on his slacks. Finally. Fast and desperate—like that motion could erase what his palm had touched, could rewind time, could un-hear the words his wife had screamed loud enough to register on the building’s seismic monitors.

It left a faint streak on the gray fabric that caught the light like a crime scene photo in a documentary nobody wanted to watch.

Everyone saw it.

"You—you fucking—" Dominic’s voice came out like an engine that wouldn’t turn over, sputtering and coughing and refusing to start.

"You’re a FUCKING KID.

"

I looked at him.

Oh no.

Oh no no no.

This man was wearing a Brunello Cucinelli blazer with boat shoes.

BOAT SHOES

. In an office building.

In Hollywood. My guy looked like a J.Crew catalog fucked a mid-level finance bro and the baby grew up to marry above his tax bracket, then bought a

yacht

he never used because he got seasick just looking at the ocean.

This was who she’d been sleeping next to every night? This was the competition? No cap, i

f you put this man in a lineup with a store mannequin, the mannequin would have more going on

—better posture, sharper jawline, and at least the

dignity not to wear boat shoes indoors

.

"A

PUNK,"

he continued, stepping forward. "You come into MY building—you touch MY WIFE—"

"Technically she touched me first with her feet," I said. "I was just sitting there."

Wrong thing to say for de-escalation purposes. Perfect thing to say for comedy purposes. Dominic’s face went so red I thought he was going to pop a blood vessel and redecorate the ceiling in a modern art installation titled "Marital Rage #47."

"I’LL FUCKING DESTROY YOU—"

He stepped into my space. Close. Scotch breath and expensive aftershave and the sour undertone of a man whose adrenal glands were doing overtime while his dignity filed for unemployment. His fist clenched at his side. Jaw working.

He was trying to look intimidating. He was giving Dollar Store Liam Neeson.

I didn’t move.

Not an inch. Let him stand there—three inches from my face—and feel the fact that he’d already lunged once and I’d sidestepped it like a QTE prompt in a cutscene I’d already played through three times on easy mode.

"I will

END

you," he said. Quieter now. Trying for dangerous. Landing on desperate. "Do you understand me? I will have you arrested. I’ll call the police.

Statutory—you’re

a

MINOR,

you sick fuck, she’s thirty-one—"

"I’m eighteen," I lied. Smoothly. Without blinking. "And she’s incredible. You should know that. You married her."

That one landed different.

Not as a comeback. As a fact. Dominic’s mouth opened. Closed. The word

married

hung in the air between us like smoke from a funeral pyre he’d just realized was his own.

Gerald finally spoke.

"

Everyone out.

" His voice was gravel. Old gravel. The voice of a man who’d spent thirty years running a company and had never once imagined he’d need to use that voice in this specific situation—his

daughter’s

office turned into a

live-action

cuckoldry

documentary with no commercial breaks.

"NOW."

Nobody moved. The employees in the doorway were frozen—not from obedience but from the sheer psychological impossibility of looking away from this. This was better than anything

Ashworth-Mead

had ever produced.

This was peak reality television happening live and nobody had signed a release form, nobody had a producer to yell "cut," and nobody had the emotional bandwidth to process what they were witnessing.

"

I SAID OUT

."

The spell cracked. Bodies shuffled. The brunette assistant who’d whispered "oh my god" earlier practically sprinted for the hallway, badge clattering against her hip like change in a beggar’s cup.

Two others followed.

The female security guards hesitated—one of them glancing at me one more time with an expression that said her incident report was going to be very creatively edited, possibly rewritten as erotic fiction under a pseudonym—before stepping back.

The development team woman was last. She paused at the door. Looked at Dominic. Looked at me. Looked at Dominic again.

The comparison registered on her face in real time—the way people’s faces change when they see a

Honda

parked next to a

Lamborghini.

Not judgment. Just... math. Cold, unforgiving,

workplace-gossip math

.

She left.

The door—or what remained of it, hanging crooked on one hinge like a drunk leaning against a lamppost—couldn’t close behind her.

Four people in the room now.

Gerald. Dominic. Eziel behind me

. And the

teenage god

who’d just rearranged their entire family tree with his dick and a smile.

Fr fr, if someone had told me six months ago that I’d be standing shirtless in a Hollywood executive’s office after

fucking

his

daughter

for three hours while he drank scotch to celebrate a deal I’d already won, I would have said

yeah that sounds about right because apparently my life is a Netflix series that God writes while drunk, high, and taking notes from

Greek tragedy

fanfiction

.

Gerald turned to me. Businessman mode. I watched the switch happen—grief and horror getting shoved into a box labeled "Later" while the executive who’d built a production company from nothing stepped forward.

Old school Hollywood.

The man who’d survived three market crashes and two streaming wars. He wasn’t going to scream. He was going to negotiate. He was going to try to win this with words the way he’d won every other battle in his life.

"Son," he said. And the word dripped with the specific condescension of a man who called everyone under forty son, like it was a title he’d invented. "I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you think you’ve

accomplished

here tonight. But I know what this looks like. And I know what happens when stories like this get out."

"Is that a

threat,

Gerald?"

"It’s a reality check."

He straightened his cuffs. A power move from 1987 that probably worked on lesser men. "You’re a teenager who just slept with a married woman in a building full of witnesses.

My building. My daughter

. How do you think this plays? For you? For your little... company?"

He said company the way people say hobby—like it was something cute and temporary that would eventually be outgrown, preferably with therapy and a stable job selling insurance.

ARIA whispered through the connection.

"Calm. Already three moves ahead. He’s bluffing. He won’t go public. The scandal destroys Ashworth-Mead’s reputation worse than yours. Stock drops nine to fourteen percent overnight. He knows this. He’s calculating the cost-benefit right now and the numbers aren’t in his favor."

I know.

I smiled. Not wide. Just enough.

"Go ahead," I said. "Call the press. Tell them the whole story. Make sure you include the part where six floors of your building heard your daughter screaming my name loud enough to wake the dead and probably trigger the building’s emergency broadcast system. See how that plays for Ashworth-Mead stock tomorrow morning when the headlines read

’Executive’s Daughter Prefers Teenager to Husband—Live Audio Available.’"

Gerald’s jaw tightened. The cuff-straightening stopped.

"Or,"

I continued, "we can keep this between the four people in this room. And the six employees who are currently in the elevator trying to figure out how to describe what they just saw without getting fired, blacklisted, or involuntarily committed.

Oh, by the way... she’s mine now!

"

Gerald said nothing. Smart man. Slow learner, but smart.

I looked at Dominic then. Really looked at him. And I dropped the smile. Now fully dressed.

"Dominic. If she was happy, I wouldn’t be here."

Dominic’s face collapsed. Not into rage. Into something worse. The look of a man realizing the woman he’d married had been quietly starving for years, and he’d never noticed because he’d been too busy in his own shit he thought we didn’t know.

He didn’t speak.

He just stood there—wet hand still raised like a white flag nobody had asked for—while the silence stretched and stretched until it felt like the room itself was embarrassed for him.

Eziel’s fingers tightened on the back of my shirt

.