Chapter 225- Battle of Two Lovers
Her voice was smooth, even, carrying exactly the right measure of authority without a single jagged edge. "What I can confirm is that I am here today at the direct invitation of the family, and I intend to honor that invitation with the seriousness it deserves."
A reporter pushed closer. "But Miss Thalia — are you prepared to take on the full weight of—"
"I am prepared," she said simply, and the quiet certainty in those three words landed like a door clicking shut. Final. Unhurried. No elaboration necessary.
She moved.
The room parted for her. It always did — not because she forced it, but because she moved through spaces as if she had already been there before, as if the room had been arranged in anticipation of her arrival. Her heels found a rhythm against the floor again as she crossed toward the head of the table, where the broad-shouldered, silver-haired figure of the Black family patriarch sat watching her approach with eyes that had spent decades reading rooms and the people in them.
She sat beside him.
The cameras didn’t stop.
The patriarch’s voice, when he spoke, carried the particular weight of a man accustomed to being heard in complete silence. He didn’t raise it. He didn’t need to.
"I would like it formally recorded," he said, his gaze sweeping the room with measured calm, "that as of today, I declare Thalia as my daughter-in-law. And further — that I am transferring full ownership of all industries under the Black family name to her keeping."
The room went very still for exactly one second.
Then it detonated.
’Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.’
Voices crashed into each other, questions becoming indistinguishable from noise. The suits around the table exchanged rapid glances. Someone at the far end dropped a pen. The press section surged forward with fresh desperation, microphones waving like signals from a sinking ship.
Thalia sat with her hands folded on the table.
Her face was composed. Her eyes were level. She answered two questions with diplomatic precision and deflected a third with the kind of practiced grace that looked effortless only because it was anything but.
But behind the composure, in the lowest, most private chamber of her chest — something small and cold and fierce was whispering.
’Now let’s see who comes crawling.’
---
Elsewhere.
The apartment was warm and dim, the television casting pale blue light across the room. On the couch, sprawled with the casual, boneless ease of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin and nothing else, was Cruxius.
He wasn’t watching the screen particularly. He rarely watched anything ’particularly’. Watching things that way required caring about them, and caring about things required a kind of investment that he distributed sparingly.
But the press conference had come on between segments, and the face on the screen had made him pause.
He watched Thalia sit beside the patriarch. He watched the old man speak. He watched the room lose its composure while she kept hers, and something at the corner of his mouth moved — a small, involuntary twitch.
Then he laughed.
It came out soft and low, the chuckle of a man amused by something he genuinely hadn’t predicted ’quite’ this soon. His head tilted back briefly against the couch cushion, bare chest rising with the exhale.
"...This took over so soon," he murmured, more to the ceiling than to anyone present. His voice was idle, unhurried. "I genuinely thought it wasn’t going to happen for a while yet. Somewhere further down the line."
His eyes returned to the screen.
He ’did’ remember it. In the scattered, nonlinear way his future memories surfaced — impressions more than footage, emotional residue more than clear images — he had known this moment existed somewhere ahead of him. But the timeline had compressed. She had moved faster than the version of events he carried in the back of his memory.
His brow creased, just barely.
He looked down.
His head shook once, slow and quiet, like a man reviewing his own miscalculation without particular self-recrimination. Simply noting it. Adjusting.
’She wanted to make me crawl.’
The thought arrived without heat. He turned it over the way he might turn over an interesting object found unexpectedly — examining it, assessing it, deciding what it was worth.
She was angry. Not at the surface things. Thalia was too proud to be genuinely undone by surface things. No — she was angry the way deep water is cold. The way pressure builds in sealed spaces. Something Seleyena had said had found the precise crack in her armor, and instead of collapsing, Thalia had done what Thalia always did.
She had gone looking for leverage.
And she had found it in the most efficient place available to her.
’Smart,’ he thought. ’Terribly, infuriatingly smart.’
His phone lit up on the cushion beside him.
He glanced at it without urgency. A message. He read the name attached to it, and for a moment — a genuine moment — he almost let it pass.
Jenny.
Thalia’s step-sister.
He had ignored her before. Not out of dislike, not out of anything particularly considered. She simply hadn’t been relevant. She was background. A name in the margins of a story that centered elsewhere.
But now.
Now Thalia had decided — clearly, deliberately, with the kind of surgical precision that made him respect and resent her in equal measure — to poke her fingers into his affairs. To rearrange the board while he sat watching the television. To make herself so immovable, so publicly declared, so structurally embedded in the Black family machinery that extracting her would require ’him’ to make a move.
’She wants me to come to her.’
His thumb hovered over the screen.
’She wants me to feel it — the pressure. She wants me restless.’
The corner of his mouth curved, slow and deliberate. Not the twitching half-amusement from a moment ago. This was different. Quieter. More certain.
He picked up the phone.
He dialed.
The line rang once. Twice. Then the click of connection, and the particular careful silence of someone who had been waiting for exactly this call while pretending they hadn’t.
"Hello."