Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 11: A Hundred Million Reasons

Elizabeth's sitting room felt smaller on the way out.

Diana moved through the corridor with her jaw set and her heels clicking a sharp, controlled rhythm against the hardwood floor, replaying her grandmother's words with the uncomfortable persistence of something she couldn't simply dismiss.

Is she deliberately lying to me, or does she genuinely not know who she married?

That was the part that stuck. Not the question itself — the way Elizabeth had asked it. Without cruelty. Without the performative shock that Catherine would have deployed or the sneering satisfaction Liam would have worn. Just a calm, measured scrutiny, as though Diana were a document with a suspicious clause that needed closer reading.

Diana had told her the truth, or the version of it she understood to be true.

"Marcus Hayes is nobody," she'd said. "He came from nothing. There's nothing exceptional about him."

Elizabeth had looked at her for a long moment with those still, ancient eyes.

"Then explain today," she said quietly.

Diana couldn't. She'd offered fragments — he knew about art, he'd clearly had some military background, it was all coincidence, the pen was probably acquired through luck. Each explanation sounded thinner than the last, and Elizabeth had listened to all of them with the patient, unconvinced expression of someone who had been alive long enough to know the difference between a coincidence and a pattern.

If you yourself don't know who you married, Diana, that concerns me far more than if you were lying.

She pushed through the corridor door into the main hall and nearly walked directly into Ryan Steel.

He was waiting. That much was obvious. He stood squarely in the center of the hallway with two of his associates flanking him at a respectful distance, his expression carrying the particular brand of fury that expensive men wore when the world failed to arrange itself correctly.

Marcus was still in the ballroom. Diana could see him through the open archway — seated, unhurried, the last of the departing guests moving around him like water around a stone.

Ryan didn't spare her more than a glance.

"Hayes." His voice carried the full weight of his irritation as he crossed into the ballroom. "We need to talk."

Marcus looked up with the mildly interested expression of a man who had been interrupted while thinking about something far more important.

"Mr. Steel."

Ryan pulled out the chair across from him and didn't sit in it so much as plant himself — a deliberate, territorial gesture. He loosened the button of his jacket and fixed Marcus with a look that had probably ended negotiations before they started.

"I'll be straightforward with you," Ryan said. "I don't know what game you're running with Diana Morrison, and I don't particularly care. What I care about is that it ends."

"Is that right," Marcus said.

"I'm prepared to be generous." Ryan's tone made generosity sound like a threat. "I'll give you enough to start over somewhere else. New city, clean slate. Whatever a man in your situation needs."

Marcus regarded him with the calm patience of someone waiting for a point to arrive.

"How much?" Ryan pressed.

"You already owe me half a million," Marcus said simply. "Perhaps start there."

Ryan's eye twitched. "That's not—"

"You made a public agreement. In front of witnesses." Marcus tilted his head slightly. "I'd settle that first before making new offers. It's a matter of credibility."

The muscle in Ryan's jaw worked hard. Around the edges of the ballroom, the few remaining guests had gone very still, cups raised halfway to mouths, conversations abandoned. Diana stood in the archway, watching.

She had seen her mother offer Marcus ten million that morning.

He had smiled and said it wouldn't cover his monthly expenses.

She had not known what to make of it then. She still didn't.

"Fine." Ryan's voice dropped low and deliberate. "You want a number? Here's a number." He leaned forward with both hands on the table. "One hundred million dollars. Cash. Transferred to any account you name, in any country you choose." The words landed with the satisfying weight of a man who had never once in his life said a number he couldn't back up. "You walk out of the Morrison house tonight. You tear up whatever arrangement you've made with Diana. And you never come back."

The remaining guests went absolutely silent.

Diana felt the air leave the room.

One hundred million. She turned the number over in her mind and felt faintly unsteady. Earlier she had watched Marcus decline ten million from her mother with a slight smile. She had filed it away as arrogance, delusion, some elaborate performance from a man with nothing to lose. But her mother's ten million had barely registered on his face, and now Ryan — Ryan, who collected Caravaggios and gave jade sculptures that cost three million without blinking — was sitting across from Marcus Hayes in a worn gray suit, offering him one hundred million dollars to disappear.

And Marcus Hayes was looking at him the way a man looks at a menu in a restaurant he already knows he won't be ordering from.

The silence stretched.

Marcus pushed his chair back from the table. He stood slowly, straightening his jacket with two unhurried tugs, and turned away from Ryan as though the conversation had reached its natural conclusion.

He walked across the ballroom.

He walked past the frozen guests.

He walked past the lingering relatives and the half-cleared glasses and the ruins of Liam's jade disaster still being quietly tidied by staff.

He stopped beside Diana.

Without a word, without looking at her for permission or explanation, he reached out and took her hand — his fingers interlocking with hers in a clean, deliberate, entirely public gesture — and walked forward.

Diana went with him. She wasn't entirely sure why.

Behind them, the silence broke into a wave of sharp, collective breath. Someone whispered. Someone else didn't bother whispering.

Ryan Steel stood alone at the table, one hundred million dollars still on his lips, watching them walk through the archway and out of the room.

His face was the color of curdled milk.