An Extremely Overpowered God Of War

Chapter 6

 Immediately Victoria cleared her throat.

The disgust on her face was open and unhidden now, not even dressed up in the polite performance she had been maintaining for the guests around her. 

She looked at Raymond the way a person looks at something they have already moved past and don't understand why it keeps reappearing.

“How could I do this?” she repeated, and let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. 

“How could you even stand there and ask me that with a straight face?” She tilted her head slightly. “Well I never loved you in the first place. We got married and we had barely spent any real time together before you volunteered yourself to join the military on behalf of this entire family. You just left, that was all we needed from you.”

 She gestured at him with one hand, a single dismissive sweep from his head to his feet. 

“And look at you now. You come back after five years looking like this, with nothing to show for any of it. Not a single thing.”

She straightened slightly, and something shifted in her expression the disgust giving way to something colder and more deliberate.

“While you were out there achieving nothing, I was building something.” Her voice took on a different quality now, smoother, almost rehearsed, like she had imagined saying this out loud more than once. 

“The business has been extraordinary. Contracts back to back, one after another, and before long I had crossed two hundred million. Two hundred million, Raymond. And there is another contract coming very soon all of it made possible because of Marcus.” She glanced briefly at the man standing beside her, something warm and proprietary in the look. 

“If you went online right now and searched my name, you would find that I am the number one leading entrepreneur in this country. Among women, I am at the top. The very top.” Her eyes came back to Raymond and the warmth disappeared. 

“So don't stand there thinking you can come back here after five years with that bag and that face and stand toe to toe with me. That is not possible. It was never going to be possible.”

She folded her arms.

“I knew today was our anniversary. I wasn't expecting you honestly, I wasn't thinking about you at all but we moved ahead anyway because I already knew you weren't going to come back with anything worth celebrating. And we checked, Raymond. We actually looked you up. Your military record, your rank, everything. Do you know what came back?” She paused just long enough to let the silence do its work. 

“Error. Every single time. Error.”

Marcus spoke for the first time since Raymond had walked through the door. His voice was measured and almost generous in its tone, the way a man sounds when he wants to appear reasonable while delivering something cruel.

“When a military background check returns an error,” he said, “it only ever meant you things. The person simply is dead or has no rank significant enough to be entered into the database. Which means they are sitting at the very bottom.” He looked at Raymond without any particular expression on his face. “Which, honestly, makes complete sense.”

Victoria nodded once, like the matter was settled.

Marcus looked toward her mother and gave a small gesture.

“Out of respect for the day,” he said, his voice taking on a tone of exaggerated generosity, “and because I can see that you are clearly hungry, I will make sure you leave here with something.”

Victoria's mother stepped forward.

The look on her face as she crossed the room toward Raymond was the same one she had been wearing since the moment she first opened her mouth contempt worn so comfortably it had become a permanent feature. 

She stopped in front of him and held out two envelopes, one smaller and one thick, extending them toward him like she was dropping something into a bin.

“This one,” she said, tapping the smaller envelope, “contains fifty thousand dollars. And this one,” she tapped the larger, “is a divorce paper. We had it drafted quite some time ago.” She pushed both of them toward him and her expression didn't change by a single degree. “Take the money, sign the papers, and get the hell out of this place.”

Raymond's jaw tightened further so hard the muscle along the side of his face was visible.

He looked at the envelopes in Victoria's mother's outstretched hand and then looked past them, his eyes moving between her and Victoria with something burning steadily behind them that hadn't broken the surface yet but was very close to it.

“A divorce paper.”He said it quietly, almost to himself, like he was testing the weight of the words to make sure he had heard correctly. Then his voice came back fuller, with an edge underneath it that hadn't been there before. 

“You are standing here handing me a divorce paper. After everything I did for this family. After every sacrifice I made for all of you ...you have the confidence, the actual boldness, to put a divorce paper in my face and tell me to sign it and leave.”

He let that sit for just a second.

“Like it means nothing. Like it all just means absolutely nothing.” His voice dropped lower. 

“Do you think any of this just fell out of the sky? Do you think those contracts, the money, the business, the name she's out here bragging about do you think all of that just appeared from nowhere?” He shook his head slowly. 

“Do you have any idea who was pulling strings behind the scenes? Who was making sure the doors opened? Who was making sure that yes kept happening when it should have been no?”

Victoria's expression didn't shift. She looked at him the way a person looks at someone who is making a scene they find mildly irritating rather than anything that deserves genuine engagement.

“Shut your mouth, Raymond.” Her voice was flat and final. 

“You did nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She unfolded her arms and tilted her head slightly. 

“Are you seriously standing there trying to tell me that you were the one who pulled it all off? You?” A short breath escaped her. 

“Everyone in this room knows where those contracts came from. Most of them came from Marcus. All the ones that actually mattered came from Marcus. He's the one who made it happen, and that is exactly why he is man enough to stand where he is standing right now and be my husband.”

She held Raymond's gaze without flinching.

“And let me be very clear with you, since you want to stand there talking about who did what.” Her voice took on a quiet, deliberate edge. 

“Marcus is not some ordinary military man that you can open your mouth and speak about any way you like. You need to watch your words very carefully.” She paused, letting the next part land the way she intended it to. 

“He is a one star King of War.”