Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 13: Nobody's Permission

Catherine didn't let him get through the door.

Marcus had one foot across the threshold when she descended — wine glass abandoned on the side table, both hands free now, her voice filling the entire entrance hall with the force of someone who had been rehearsing this moment since the drive home.

"Do you have any idea —" she started, then stopped, as though the question was too large and she needed to find a smaller entrance point. She tried again. "Do you have any concept of your station? Any at all?"

Marcus stood in the doorway. He didn't step back. He didn't step forward.

"You are a nobody," Catherine said, and the word came out with surgical precision, stripped of every courtesy, every social veneer. "You are a man who answered a newspaper advertisement and lucked his way into my daughter's house. You own nothing. You are nothing. And tonight you strutted around the Steel family estate like you had the right to breathe the same air as people who have built actual legacies."

Diana closed the front door behind her with a quiet click and stood slightly apart, her coat still on, watching.

"Not only," Catherine continued, her voice climbing, "did you drag yourself into the spotlight like some street performer desperate for applause — you embarrassed this entire family. In front of the Steels. In front of Paul Chen. In front of people whose opinions actually matter in this city."

"Catherine —" Richard started from the hallway entrance.

"Don't." She held up one hand without looking at him. Her eyes stayed locked on Marcus. "And as if the embarrassment wasn't enough — do you understand what you've done? The Steel family doesn't forget. Liam Steel does not forget. Ryan Steel certainly does not forget." Her voice dropped an octave, which made it worse somehow — quieter and more venomous. "You have put this family in danger, you foolish, clueless little man."

Marcus let her finish.

Then he said, with the same unhurried steadiness he had maintained all evening: "I was doing what any husband should do."

"Husband." Catherine repeated the word like it tasted wrong. "You are not a husband. You are a transaction. You are a temporary arrangement that Diana made without consulting anyone, and the sooner you understand your place in this household, the better it will go for you." She took a step closer. "You are a placeholder. Act like one."

Diana's eyes moved to Marcus.

She studied him the way she studied contracts — looking for the reaction, the crack, the place where the pressure would find its way in. He gave her nothing. His expression was level, composed, and utterly undisturbed, and she found herself in the uncomfortable position of not being able to tell if he was genuinely unaffected or simply that well-controlled.

She thought about how quickly he had signed her contract. Every clause, every humiliating condition, absorbed without protest or negotiation.

She had assumed that meant he was spineless.

Standing in the entrance hall watching him absorb her mother's fury without flinching, she was beginning to question that assumption in a way that irritated her.

He had put Liam on the floor without raising his voice. He had dismantled Ryan's Caravaggio in front of a hundred witnesses. He had turned down a hundred million dollars and walked away holding her hand like it was the easiest decision he'd ever made.

Spineless men did not do those things.

She filed the thought away and kept her face neutral.

"Ryan Steel and Lucas Steel," Catherine was saying now, "are people you do not cross. Do you understand me? What you need to do — what you will do — is contact Ryan tomorrow morning, go to wherever he is, and you will apologize." She enunciated the last word with exaggerated clarity, as though speaking to someone with a limited vocabulary. "You will apologize to Ryan and to Liam, and you will grovel if that's what it takes, and you will pray — pray — that they're in a forgiving mood. Because if they're not —"

"No," Marcus said.

The word was so simple and so clean that it stopped Catherine mid-sentence like a door closing.

She blinked. "What did you just —"

"No," he said again, with the same tone. Not defiant. Not aggressive. Simply final, the way a structural wall is final — not arguing with the pressure, just not moving under it.

Catherine's face went through several transitions in rapid succession. Disbelief. Comprehension. Then a fury so complete it arrived at a strange kind of calm.

She crossed the remaining distance between them in three steps and put herself directly in front of him, close enough that she had to look up slightly, and raised one finger inches from his face.

"If you do not go and apologize to those men," she said very quietly, "and if you do not then have the good sense to walk away from Diana and this family, I will make you leave. Do you understand me? I will make your life so small and so difficult that you will beg to go."

Diana moved.

It was automatic — she was across the foyer before she'd fully decided to be, and she stepped into the narrow space between her mother and Marcus with her back to him and her eyes on Catherine.

"Mother." Her voice was flat and final. "Stop."

"Diana, this doesn't concern —"

"The only person," Diana said, "who has the authority to make Marcus Hayes leave is me." She held her mother's gaze without blinking. "Not you. Not Ryan Steel. Not anyone else in this family." She let that sit for exactly one second. "That is how the arrangement works."

Catherine stared at her daughter.

The room was completely silent.

Diana did not look at Marcus. She didn't need to. She kept her eyes forward and her spine straight and her voice utterly devoid of warmth, because this wasn't protection — it was jurisdiction. Marcus Hayes was her contract, her decision, and her problem to manage.

Nobody else's.