Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 633

Chapter 633: The Weight She Carries

The party had eased off its heels and sunk into its bones. Conversations broke into smaller constellations, music softened into a background pulse, champagne glasses sat abandoned at strategic angles, candlelight clinging to their rims like it didn’t want to let go. This was the good hour.

The honest hour.

When people had drunk just enough to mean what they said, but not enough to embarrass themselves with it.

I felt her before I heard her.

Catherine’s hand closed around my forearm, light but intentional, the kind of touch that wasn’t asking permission so much as assuming it would be granted.

"Can I steal you for a moment?"

I glanced at Madison. She’d already clocked it, already weighed it, and gave the smallest nod. Green light.

"Lead the way."

Catherine guided me past the bar, through a pair of glass doors I hadn’t noticed until they opened, and onto a private terrace. The night hit like a reset button. Cool air, sharp and clean, carrying the metallic scent of the city below. The terrace wrapped around the building’s corner, glass railings offering nothing between us and Los Angeles except gravity and poor decisions.

Downtown burned to the south, towers stacked with windows like vertical rivers of light. To the east, warehouses squatted in pools of orange sodium glow, streets mostly empty, waiting. North toward Hollywood, the hills rose dark and patient beneath a sky that never quite learned how to be black in a city like this.

Some windows were dark. People asleep. People trusting the future to show up on schedule. Others blazed bright. Night shifts. Insomniacs. Ambition refusing to clock out. The city breathed in rotations, never fully alive, never fully at rest.

Catherine leaned against the railing. I joined her. We watched the sprawl for a while, the silence comfortable, heavy with things that didn’t need to be said right away.

"It’s strange," she said finally, voice low. "How many lives are happening at once. Millions of people. Every one of them choosing something, losing something, becoming something, living consequences, building futures," She pointed vaguely. "That window—someone’s falling in love for the first time. That one—someone’s getting their heart ripped out. That one—someone’s dying alone." 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"And we’re up here drinking champagne on a rooftop they’ll never afford," I said.

She smiled. "Exactly."

She turned toward me, the city painting her in shadows and angles. Emerald fabric clung to her like it had opinions. Her eyes were dark, thoughtful, dangerous in the quiet way. "Do you ever think about that? The randomness of it? You were born into one life. I was born into another. The woman cleaning your house was born into a third. None of us chose it. We just arrived. And then spent decades pretending we did."

"All the time," I said. "I was supposed to be nobody. Lincoln Heights. Adopted by a nurse who worked herself half to death to keep the lights on. Statistically, I should be arguing with a landlord and losing. Instead, I’m here."

"Because you made choices."

"Because I got lucky," I said. "Lucky enough to be smart. Lucky enough to see systems instead of walls. Lucky enough to meet the right people at the right moments." My gaze dropped briefly, unashamed, taking in the heat she didn’t bother hiding. "Then I made choices with that luck. But the starting line was still a coin toss."

"Luck and choice," Catherine said, fingers tracing the glass railing, red nails catching the light. "The oldest argument there is. How much of success is earned, and how much is borrowed from circumstance?" She smiled, biting her lower lip like she was considering something dangerous.

The city hummed below us, indifferent and eternal, while we stood above it trying to decide how much of ourselves we were responsible for.

"I like to tell myself Meridian Elite was built on brilliance. Strategy. Relentless intelligence," Catherine said. "And it was. Mostly."

She smiled thinly. "But the truth is uglier and cleaner at the same time. I started with divorce money. Capital most people never touch. I had doors open to me that others don’t even know exist. Schools. Mentors. Networks that would make careers by accident."

"Sometimes," she admitted. "Other times I think guilt is a luxury emotion. I didn’t choose my advantages any more than someone else chose their disadvantages. The only moral question is what you do with what lands in your lap."

"Because you know what it’s like to be treated like property."

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