Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 918

Chapter 918: A $85 million Beautiful Reason Why

Forty-seven floors above Hollywood Boulevard, two men were laughing like they’d just robbed a casino and the house was still counting chips.

Gerald Ashworth—silver-haired, mid-sixties, founder of Ashworth-Mead Pictures—sat behind his corner-office desk with a scotch in one hand and a signed contract in the other, shaking his head like a man who’d just found a winning lottery ticket in the pocket of a coat he hadn’t worn since the Clinton administration.

Beside him, Dominic—Gerald’s son-in-law, VP of Development—was doing the math on his phone and cackling harder every time another zero registered.

$85 million.

That’s what the kid had paid. A teenager.

Walked into their office three hours ago with a woman who looked like she bench-pressed Buicks for cardio and another who looked like she’d been 3D-printed in a law firm’s future wing. Sat across from Gerald with the posture of someone ordering coffee and said, calm as death: "I want the Celestial Widow."

The Celestial Widow—their dead project. Their graveyard IP. Gerald’s daughter Eziel had written the original screenplay—a cosmic revenge saga about a goddess whose divine husband is murdered by the pantheon, who descends to the mortal world wearing his power like stolen armor, hunting the gods who betrayed him with a wrath so pure it could sterilize stars.

Two years of Eziel’s life. Seven drafts. Shelved because the character mirrored an existing Marvel property too closely.

Every studio they’d pitched had said the same thing: too close, too risky, dead on arrival, please leave through the service exit.

And this kid bought it. Not optioned it. Not licensed it. Full IP acquisition—the character, the screenplay, all associated materials, all derivative rights, sequel and remake rights, adaptation rights across all media, ancillary market rights, merchandise licensing.

Everything. Outright purchase. No partnership. No backend deals. No ongoing relationship. Clean transaction.

Money for paper. Goodbye.

Their legal team had drawn up the rights purchase agreement in under an hour. The kid didn’t even negotiate the purchase price—no floors, no ceilings, no percentage-of-budget calculations.

Just a flat $85 million wire transfer for an IP they’d valued internally at zero. No option period. No development contingencies.

No reversion clauses. He owned it. Fully. Permanently.

The pre-production materials—concept art, storyboards, character designs, three drafts of a shooting script—were included in the sale. Development notes. Market research. Everything Ashworth-Mead had invested before shelving the project. All of it transferred to Carter Entertainment, a company Gerald had never heard of until today.

"Eighty-five million," Gerald said, refilling his scotch with the reverence of a man pouring holy water. "For the Widow."

Dominic grinned so wide his face looked like it might split. "Kid’s got more money than brains and worse taste than a trust-fund art collector."

Gerald raised his glass. "To rich teenagers with bad investment strategies and apparently zero legal counsel."

They clinked like men who’d just sold a haunted house to someone who thought ghosts were a feature.

Six floors below, his daughter—also Dominic’s wife—screamed a name that wasn’t Dominic’s.

And outside—hovering in the sky beside the glass tower, invisible to every mortal eye, wings spread against the smog-stained California sunset—

Seraphiel watched.

She had descended into the mortal sphere seventeen minutes ago.

The sensory assault had nearly undone her. Sound crashed like breaking oceans. Smell clawed at her golden nostrils—exhaust, fried food, perfume, fear, lust, ambition, all braided into a choking tapestry.

The sheer density of mortal existence pressed against her divine form like gravity turned hostile, trying to crush divinity into meat.

She’d compartmentalized it. Filed it. Adapted.

She’d found him through resonance. His power signature lit up the spiritual spectrum like a bonfire soaked in napalm—a pulse of corrupted energy so intense that tracking it required no effort at all. She’d followed it here.

To this glass tower.

To this city of beautiful liars.

She hovered now—wings spread wide, golden primaries burning with celestial flame that bent light around her like a cloak of living dawn, invisible behind the shimmering veil that separated seraph from sinner.

The glass wall of the forty-first floor was three feet from her face.

And through it, she could see everything.

He’s young. That was the first observation. Not clinical or detached. A blade of recognition that sliced clean through her immortal composure.

Instead—a boy.

A single luminous tear slid from her left eye. She did not wipe it. Did not acknowledge it. It traced its familiar path—down her cheek, along her jaw, falling into the mortal air where it evaporated before reaching the street forty-one floors below.

A seraph’s involuntary response to witnessing profanity. Nothing more.

Power signature intensifies during physical contact. She observed. His hands moved on the woman’s body. Every touch landed with inhuman accuracy.

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