Chapter 986: Fuming and Vengeful Woman

The wine glass

hit the wall

with a sound like a gunshot.

Cabernet

exploded

on impact—dark red liquid splashing across the pristine white surface in a violent bloom, spreading outward in jagged streaks that looked like something between abstract art and arterial spray.

The glass itself shattered a half-second later, fragments catching the light as they scattered—glittering shards spinning through the air before raining down onto the marble floor in a cascade of tinkling, broken music.

The stem bounced once, rolled, and came to rest against the baseboard.

A single drop of wine slid down the wall in a slow, lazy rivulet, tracing a path through the splash pattern like a tear.

Aurelia’s hand was still extended. Fingers open. Trembling.

Then her eyes

snapped

to where the glass had hit—and her heart stopped.

Eros’s

Lust and Me.

Six million dollars of canvas and oil and raw, devastating beauty hung exactly fourteen inches to the right of the wine splash.

Her most powerful piece.

The most

extraordinary

work of art she had ever owned—past its nudity, past whatever surface-level scandal people wanted to project onto it, it was transcendent. The kind of piece that made you stand in front of it and forget your own name and rewired something in your chest every time you looked at it.

Six million dollars.

Fourteen inches

from a Cabernet catastrophe.

She stepped closer. Examined the frame. The canvas. The edges.

Not a single drop had touched it.

It was just so precious and held so much meaning of her life beyond lust, that she couldn’t afford ruining it even with a single drop.

She exhaled—long, shaking, the kind of exhale that only comes when you’ve narrowly avoided destroying something irreplaceable because your temper decided to stage a one-woman coup d’état against physics.

She turned away from the wall, heels clicking sharp against marble, and pressed a button on her intercom without looking.

"Someone clean this up.

Now

."

Then she pulled her phone from the pocket of her silk robe and called her assistants. Both of them.

She had something she needed urgently.

She’d spent six million on that painting.

Yes, it was worth it. Every single cent. It was beautiful and brutal and it spoke to something primal—the most powerful piece she’d ever seen, the kind of work that made galleries feel inadequate for housing it.

She would have paid double.

Triple.

Whatever it took to have it.

But she hadn’t bought it just for the art.

Double intentions.

She’d bought it to get a few minutes with

Eros

. That was the play after she secured it.

Six million was the key.

In Aurelia’s world, money opened every room,

unlocked

every conversation, purchased every introduction. That was how power worked.

That was how

she

worked.

You wanted access to someone? You

bought your way

into their orbit and let gravity do the rest.

It had never failed her. Not once. Not in years of operating at the top of a food chain where the apex predators wore couture and filed lawsuits instead of baring teeth.

Six million had once bought her a private audience with a sitting head of state.

Two million had opened the door to a pharmaceutical patent that tripled her portfolio. She’d once purchased a Giacometti sculpture she didn’t even like because the seller’s wife sat on a board she wanted access to.

Money was language

. Money was lockpick. Money was the universal solvent that dissolved every barrier between Aurelia and whatever she wanted.

And

yet...

The bastard had the

audacity

to run away from her.

Not politely excuse himself or a courtesy for an apologetic exit. Not even offer a rain check with the kind of empty charm beautiful men usually deployed when they wanted to escape without burning a bridge.

No. He had

run

.

Physically.

With another woman.

Someone’s wife

. He’d scooped her up and sprinted out the back door of a gallery, fled into the night in a Lamborghini, and left her standing there like a fool.

Like her six million was pocket change. Like

she

was pocket change. Like Aurelia—who had made grown men weep in boardrooms, who had toppled CEOs with a single phone call, who had once told a United States senator to go fuck himself on live television and watched her approval ratings

go up

—

was simply not interesting enough for him to stay for.

And as if that weren’t enough—

as if the humiliation of being rejected by a man she’d spent six million dollars trying to meet weren’t sufficient

—

Charlotte

had been there.

Charlotte, who had

removed

her mask with deliberate, theatrical slowness, looked Aurelia dead in the eye, and given her

that

grin.

That mocking, self-satisfied

grin that Charlotte had perfected over years of being exactly the kind of woman Aurelia wanted to destroy.

Charlotte.

The incompetent heiress she’d dismantled on international television. The woman she’d called a trust-fund accident who’d inherited a tech company she wasn’t qualified to run.

That Charlotte

—

now standing in the inner circle of the most magnetic man

Aurelia had ever seen, wearing that grin like a crown, looking at Aurelia with the specific, devastating pity of someone who’d won and wanted you to know it.

That anger had lasted all night. Through the car ride home. Through the shower.

Through the three hours of fitful sleep she’d managed before giving up at dawn. It was still burning now—hot and tight behind her sternum like a coal she couldn’t cough up.

And yet she couldn’t dare damage her piece.

She just wanted to break

everything else

.

One of her assistants rushed in—younger one, the eager one, tablet clutched to her chest like a shield—and stopped short when she saw the wine dripping down the wall and the glass on the floor.

She wisely chose not to comment.

"I found more, ma’am,

as requested." Lena said, slightly breathless. "About Eros. Not personally—I couldn’t find anything on my own. Nothing. It’s like he doesn’t exist outside of last night. But—" She held out the tablet. "There are viral videos. A lot of them."

Aurelia turned slowly.

"Viral videos?"

"They started appearing overnight.

Millions of views

. Comments in the tens of millions. Every platform."

Aurelia took the tablet and began watching.

As far as

Senithe

had told her, Eros preferred to stay in the shadows. That was his nature.

That was how he operated. After the information she’d received yesterday, Aurelia had decided to send clues—fragments, breadcrumbs, carefully curated pieces of what Senithe had shared—to her assistants with instructions to dig deeper.

Use their contacts.

Pull strings.

Find the identity of man behind the mask.

And they’d come back with... viral videos?

She watched. One after another. The supermarket clip. The

walking-in-Miami

footage. The restaurant sightings. The fan-recorded confessions. Every video polished just enough to feel organic.

Every angle flattering without looking staged. Every clip designed to make you want more while giving you absolutely nothing.

Her thumb stopped scrolling.

She watched one particular video again. Then a third time. Her eyes narrowed—not at the content, but at the

pattern

.

Aurelia wasn’t what she was being stupid. She’d outsmart her siblings by seeing what other people didn’t—the architecture behind the architecture, the strategy behind the smile, the chess move disguised as a handshake.

And what she was looking at right now wasn’t organic virality.

It was a

campaign

.

Flawless. Invisible. Running on a budget that suggested whoever was behind it considered money a polite suggestion rather than a hard constraint.