2026-01-05 17:06:31She was serious.
Kai frowned and took half a step back. The thought This woman plays dirty had just flashed through his mind when Maya borrowed the momentum and sprang into the air, a vicious flying kick sweeping straight at him.
She was far lighter than a typical power-type fighter. Her waist drew a taut, dangerous arc in midair—a flawless blend of power and grace, mesmerizing to watch.
“Nice!”
“This one’s over!”Everyone was convinced—there was no way Kai could dodge again.
But he did.
These flashy, ornamental moves were a joke to him even back when he was a child—so weak they weren’t worth a single counter. As expected, Kai didn’t even bother to change his expression. With a slight shift of his body, he cleanly dissolved the entire force of the strike.
When Maya overextended and missed, he even had the leisure to grab her and keep her from hitting the ground too hard.
That moment of casual mercy was where everything went wrong.The opposing forces collided, and Maya was pulled straight into his chest. A soft yet overwhelming impact slammed into him; her lips brushed past his neck, her warm breath grazing his skin.
The ring fell into dead silence.
The sudden intimacy exploded like a spark with no warning.
Kai’s scalp went numb. He released her at once, stumbling back with both hands raised, hurriedly looking toward the crowd as if searching for witnesses.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!”Below the ring, Lila shouted, both anxious and furious, “Kai! Get down here! Stop fooling around!”
But Maya gave him no chance to retreat.
She closed in again, her eyes completely bloodshot.
“Shut up,” she said coldly. “If I don’t beat you into submission today, I won’t call myself Maya.”
Forced to engage, Kai blocked while lowering his voice. “Just now really wasn’t—”
He didn’t finish.
Her fist was already there.
She wasn’t listening.
Kai’s gaze darkened. He finally got serious, catching an opening and preparing to end the farce with a single move.
Then—
“Stop!” Lila shouted from below.
Kai instinctively pulled back his strength and shoved Maya away instead. But his fingers tightened—and snagged the tie of her outer garment.
Rip.
The sound was soft, and deadly.
The outer layers slipped free and fell onto the ring.
The moment Maya looked down, time seemed to freeze.
The lights showed no mercy. Left in only her close-fitting undergarments, her tense lines fully exposed, cold air brushing her skin, her breathing faltered.
The crowd went silent—then came a wave of sharply suppressed gasps.
Eyes flooded in from every direction.
Maya’s face drained from flushed red to stark white in less than a second.
Then anger swallowed everything.
She snapped her head up, eyes blazing like wildfire. Shame, loss of control, the humiliation of being watched—she crushed it all deep into her bones.
She didn’t retreat. She couldn’t.
“Enjoying the view?” she growled, her voice hoarse and vicious.
The next instant, she lunged. Her legs clamped toward Kai’s head like iron shackles. One bit more force and the outcome would be unthinkable.
Kai made the call instantly, raising his hand.
“I forfeit!”The room stayed frozen for three heartbeats. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Then someone started clapping, breaking the awkward tension.
The sound broke the spell. Suddenly everyone was cheering, whistling, shouting Maya’s name—partly for her “victory,” partly to cover their own discomfort at what they’d just witnessed. The noise was deafening.
Daniel scrambled onto a table, his earlier humiliation completely forgotten. His face was flushed with vindication, his voice loud and triumphant. “Finally! Someone put him in his place!” He raised his glass high. “Drinks on me tonight! Everything—whatever you want! It’s all free!”
The crowd roared louder, surging toward the bar.
Lila shoved through them, running toward the platform. She pulled off her jacket as she climbed up, throwing it over Maya’s shoulders, wrapping it tight around her. “Are you okay?” Her voice was urgent, worried.
Maya’s hands shook as she pulled the jacket closed. Her face was still flushed—whether from exertion or humiliation, it was impossible to tell. She wouldn’t look at Lila. Wouldn’t look at anyone.
Lila glanced back at Kai, her expression a mix of anger and desperation. Her eyes screamed one message: Get out. Now.
But Maya’s gaze finally lifted, locking onto Kai. Her voice was low, shaking with suppressed rage. “This isn’t over. You hear me? We’re not done.”
Kai opened his mouth to respond—
BANG.
The main doors slammed open so hard they crashed against the walls.
Six figures in black masks stormed through, moving fast and purposeful. Every one of them had a gun, pointed right at the crowd.
The music cut off mid-beat. Conversations died mid-word.
The lead figure raised his weapon higher, his voice cutting through the sudden silence like broken glass. “NOBODY MOVE! Hands where I can see them! NOW!”
The elites froze, drinks halfway to their mouths, laughter dying in their throats.
“Everyone sit down! If anyone tries to run, I start shooting!” The leader’s eyes swept the room, cold and calculating. “Hand over Lila Hartley. Now. And maybe the rest of you walk out of here alive.”
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Chapter 48
The pillow barrier came down on a Tuesday.Neither of them announced it. Kai moved the pillows back to the headboard stack before Lila came out of the bathroom and when she emerged and saw the bed she looked at it for a moment and then got in on her side without comment. He turned off the lamp on his side. She turned off hers.The dark was the same dark as before. The distance was different.He was aware of her in the specific way you are aware of someone when the physical boundary that had been organizing that awareness is removed. The sound of her breathing. The particular way the mattress registered her weight and position. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the legal deadline and the evidence package Patricia was compiling and whether any of it would be sufficient and then made himself stop thinking about it because that was not a useful way to spend the night.He fell asleep eventually.He woke at two-seventeen by the clock on the nightstand, sitting u
Chapter 47
The conference room was on the third floor of a building that housed family court mediation services, which meant the walls were painted the particular shade of institutional beige that communicated neutrality and produced the opposite effect. Kai sat at the table with their lawyer, Patricia Chen, and looked at the beige walls and thought about how Richard had managed to make this happen in a week.The answer was that Richard had probably been preparing it for longer than a week and had filed when the moment suited him. The gala coverage had forced his hand. A positive morning in the papers was a shrinking window and Richard understood windows.The opposing lawyer was a man named Forsythe who had the specific manner of someone who had been paid to be unpleasant and had made peace with that. He arranged his documents on the table with the deliberateness of someone who wanted you to see how many there were.The judge overseeing the preliminary hearing was a woman named Caldwell, mid-six
Chapter 46
The morning papers arrived at seven and Vincent sent the digital links twenty minutes before that. Kai read them at the desk in Marcus's study, which had been cleaned and lit properly now that the generators were running permanently, and which he had been spending more time in than the master bedroom.The coverage was better than he had expected and he understood why immediately. The venue story had leaked before the gala, which meant the journalists who attended had arrived expecting a visible failure and found something else instead. Failure redeemed made a better story than success maintained. He understood this. He had given them the narrative they needed and they had used it.The Thorne Heir's Dramatic Return, one headline read. Another called the ruins venue audacious. A third ran a photograph of the entrance arch with the string lights visible through it and a caption about legacy reclaimed. Gerald Vance was quoted in one piece saying he found the evening impressive. Mrs. Black
Chapter 45
The first cars arrived at seven-thirty.Kai watched them from the entrance arch, the headlights moving up the drive through the cleared grounds, and thought about the last time vehicles had come up this road. Ten years ago they would have been fire trucks. He let the thought arrive and pass and straightened his jacket.The transformation held. That was the thing he hadn't been certain of until this moment, standing in it with other people present. In the daylight it had looked like ambition applied to wreckage. In the evening, with the string lights running through the open roof frames and along the standing walls and across the garden where the crews had cleared a decade of growth, it looked like something else. The blackened stone caught the light differently than new stone would have. The empty window frames became architecture. The collapsed east wing, carefully bordered and left as it was, looked intentional, a monument rather than a ruin.He heard a woman near the entrance say i
Chapter 44
The decision came at eleven-thirty at night, which was probably relevant to how it got made.Kai was sitting in Eleanor's study with a list of venues Vincent had compiled, each one annotated with capacity, availability, and the specific way it fell short of the Aldridge. A hotel ballroom that could manage the numbers but carried the aesthetic of a corporate conference. A private club that was technically available but whose membership list overlapped significantly with the people most likely to interpret the change as retreat. A rooftop space that was too small and too casual and would reframe the entire event in a way that served Richard's narrative rather than dismantling it.He set the list down and thought about the property Eleanor had returned to him.Lila was at the other end of the desk when he said it. She looked up from the catering contract she had been trying to salvage."The Thorne estate," he said.She looked at him for a moment. "Kai.""It's my property. It's large enou
Chapter 43
The rehearsal dinner was Lila's idea, framed as a practical necessity. Twelve guests, people who would be at the gala and who carried enough social weight that getting them wrong on the night would have consequences. A dry run, she called it. An opportunity to practice before the actual event.Kai understood the logic. He did not enjoy the three days leading up to it.Lila had constructed a system. Index cards, which she presented without irony, each one carrying a name, a face pulled from a social directory, a brief history of the relevant relationships, and the specific things that should not be said. She went through them with him at the desk in Eleanor's study each evening, running the stack like flashcards, asking questions, correcting errors, starting again.He was not good at it.The problem wasn't retention. He could retain information. The problem was that the information felt constructed, a scaffolding of social facts assembled to simulate familiarity that didn't exist, and
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