Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 986

Chapter 986: Fuming and Vengeful Woman

The wine glass hit the wall with a sound like a gunshot.

Cabernet exploded on impact—dark red liquid splashing across the pristine white surface in a violent bloom, spreading outward in jagged streaks that looked like something between abstract art and arterial spray.

The glass itself shattered a half-second later, fragments catching the light as they scattered—glittering shards spinning through the air before raining down onto the marble floor in a cascade of tinkling, broken music.

The stem bounced once, rolled, and came to rest against the baseboard.

A single drop of wine slid down the wall in a slow, lazy rivulet, tracing a path through the splash pattern like a tear.

Aurelia’s hand was still extended. Fingers open. Trembling.

Then her eyes snapped to where the glass had hit—and her heart stopped.

Eros’s Lust and Me.

Six million dollars of canvas and oil and raw, devastating beauty hung exactly fourteen inches to the right of the wine splash.

Her most powerful piece.

The most extraordinary work of art she had ever owned—past its nudity, past whatever surface-level scandal people wanted to project onto it, it was transcendent. The kind of piece that made you stand in front of it and forget your own name and rewired something in your chest every time you looked at it.

Six million dollars.

Fourteen inches from a Cabernet catastrophe.

She stepped closer. Examined the frame. The canvas. The edges.

Not a single drop had touched it.

It was just so precious and held so much meaning of her life beyond lust, that she couldn’t afford ruining it even with a single drop.

She exhaled—long, shaking, the kind of exhale that only comes when you’ve narrowly avoided destroying something irreplaceable because your temper decided to stage a one-woman coup d’état against physics.

She turned away from the wall, heels clicking sharp against marble, and pressed a button on her intercom without looking.

"Someone clean this up. Now."

Then she pulled her phone from the pocket of her silk robe and called her assistants. Both of them.

She had something she needed urgently.

She’d spent six million on that painting.

Yes, it was worth it. Every single cent. It was beautiful and brutal and it spoke to something primal—the most powerful piece she’d ever seen, the kind of work that made galleries feel inadequate for housing it.

She would have paid double.

Triple.

Whatever it took to have it.

But she hadn’t bought it just for the art.

Double intentions.

She’d bought it to get a few minutes with Eros. That was the play after she secured it.

Six million was the key.

In Aurelia’s world, money opened every room, unlocked every conversation, purchased every introduction. That was how power worked.

That was how she worked. You wanted access to someone? You bought your way into their orbit and let gravity do the rest.

It had never failed her. Not once. Not in years of operating at the top of a food chain where the apex predators wore couture and filed lawsuits instead of baring teeth.

Six million had once bought her a private audience with a sitting head of state.

Two million had opened the door to a pharmaceutical patent that tripled her portfolio. She’d once purchased a Giacometti sculpture she didn’t even like because the seller’s wife sat on a board she wanted access to.

Money was language. Money was lockpick. Money was the universal solvent that dissolved every barrier between Aurelia and whatever she wanted.

And yet...

The bastard had the audacity to run away from her.

No. He had run. Physically. With another woman. Someone’s wife. He’d scooped her up and sprinted out the back door of a gallery, fled into the night in a Lamborghini, and left her standing there like a fool.

Like her six million was pocket change. Like she was pocket change. Like Aurelia—who had made grown men weep in boardrooms, who had toppled CEOs with a single phone call, who had once told a United States senator to go fuck himself on live television and watched her approval ratings go up—was simply not interesting enough for him to stay for.

And as if that weren’t enough—as if the humiliation of being rejected by a man she’d spent six million dollars trying to meet weren’t sufficient—Charlotte had been there.

Charlotte, who had removed her mask with deliberate, theatrical slowness, looked Aurelia dead in the eye, and given her that grin.

That mocking, self-satisfied grin that Charlotte had perfected over years of being exactly the kind of woman Aurelia wanted to destroy.

That Charlotte—now standing in the inner circle of the most magnetic man Aurelia had ever seen, wearing that grin like a crown, looking at Aurelia with the specific, devastating pity of someone who’d won and wanted you to know it.

She just wanted to break everything else.

"I found more, ma’am, as requested." Lena said, slightly breathless. "About Eros. Not personally—I couldn’t find anything on my own. Nothing. It’s like he doesn’t exist outside of last night. But—" She held out the tablet. "There are viral videos. A lot of them."

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