Chapter 87 - 0087: You Two MIserable Bastards Deserve Each Other

Chapter 87: Chapter 0087: You Two MIserable Bastards Deserve Each Other

Jaxx’s Point Of View

She clawed wildly at my wrist, her manicured, blood-red nails raking frantically across my skin, desperate to break my iron grip. Her heavy pearl necklace rattled violently against her choked throat, each erratic shake of her gasping body making the expensive beads clack like rosary beads in a death prayer.

I felt her pulse hammering against my broad palm... frantic, panicked, utterly pathetic. It was strange, almost intoxicating, to feel a life reduced to nothing but that single desperate rhythm beneath my hand.

For years I had imagined this woman as untouchable, a marble statue draped in wealth and disdain, and now she trembled beneath my fingers like any other frightened animal. I had spent so many nights imagining this exact moment, rehearsing it in the dark like a prayer I never expected to be answered, and now that it had arrived, I found I didn’t recognize the calm that settled over me.

There was no triumph in it, no fire... only a strange, hollow stillness, as though some part of me had been waiting so long for this that it no longer knew how to feel anything at all.

"Jaxx! Release her!" Sebastian’s thundering voice cracked like glass, sharp, desperate, and hollow.

He didn’t look like a dying man... far from it. He was a powerfully built, terrifyingly healthy old bastard whose sheer rage had flushed his face a deep, furious crimson. He shot up from the floor, his broad chest heaving, his large fists clenching until his knuckles popped.

But despite his imposing posture, his icy blue eyes betrayed him. Fear. Pure, helpless, gut-wrenching fear of the monster he knew I had become.

I almost pitied him then, this man who had spent decades commanding boardrooms and silencing rivals with a single word, now reduced to trembling before the son he had never claimed. There was something almost satisfying in watching the cracks spread through the foundation of a man who had built his entire identity on control.

I wondered how many people in his life had ever seen him like this... stripped bare, exposed, powerless. I doubted the number reached higher than zero. Perhaps, I thought, not even he had seen himself this way before tonight.

"Take your fucking hands off my wife!" Sebastian begged, his authority dissolving into a desperate, furious plea as he slammed his hand on the desk. "Do you hear me?! Let her go right now, Jaxx! I am begging you - don’t do this!"

I didn’t even look at him. His words meant less than nothing when even he knew he couldn’t step across that room to stop me. Every syllable he uttered only confirmed how far his empire of control had crumbled the moment I walked through his door.

Decades of silencing others with nothing more than a glance, and here he stood, impotent, his voice cracking like a boy’s. I almost admired the desperation in it, the way fear stripped even powerful men down to something small and childlike.

It occurred to me that I had never once, in all my life, heard him beg for anything. Not for forgiveness, not for understanding... certainly never for me. And yet here he was, unraveling entirely for her. Matilda, choking through the suffocating grip, her eyes bulging with broken blood vessels, still tried to sneer. She tried with every dying breath to hold on to that aristocratic venom she wore like a gilded crown, the same venom she’d once used to look down her nose at my mother, at me, at anyone who dared to threaten her precious throne.

Even now, dying by inches, she couldn’t quite let go of the belief that she was better than the monster holding her. There was something almost admirable in her stubbornness, I thought... a woman clinging to her crown even as it slipped from her head.

I wondered if she had ever, in her whole gilded life, imagined an ending like this one, choking on the very pride that had once kept her so untouchably above the rest of us.

"Y-you... pathetic... son of a..." she choked out, her voice a ragged, wet rasp as her oxygen bled away.

Her words broke into violent, wheezing coughs, her face turning an ugly shade of deep purple as her upper body convulsed beneath my hand. Her high heels kicked wildly against the marble floor, striking the tile with frantic, hollow thuds that echoed off the high mahogany walls.

Somewhere beneath the rage boiling in my chest, a small, cold part of me catalogued every twitch, every gasp, filing it away as proof that even queens could be brought to their knees.

I wondered, distantly, if this was what my mother had felt like every time this woman had humiliated her in some quiet, deniable way... small, breathless, erased. That thought alone nearly made me tighten my grip further, though some last thread of restraint held me back from crossing into something I could never undo. Even monsters, I supposed, kept some small tether to the men they used to be.

I didn’t loosen my fingers an inch. Instead, I leaned closer, bringing my face right down to hers, my lips almost brushing the shell of her ear as though I were whispering sweet nothings into her ear instead of slowly strangling her.

"Words like that, Matilda," I whispered, my tone sickeningly slow, calm, and deliberate, "will get you put in a cold wooden box under six feet of dirt."

Her hands scrabbled frantically at my forearms, her sharp nails digging in hard enough to draw small beads of blood, but I didn’t even flinch. She gasped, wheezed, choking on her own bloated arrogance, yet I could still see the spite flickering in her tear-filled eyes... the desperate, pathetic attempt to prove she wasn’t completely broken by me.

But panic had already taken deep, unyielding root, and beneath the fury, I could see something else surfacing: the dawning, horrifying realization that she might actually die in this room, on this rug, at the hands of a man she had never once considered her equal.

It must have been a special kind of horror, I thought, to die believing yourself superior to your own killer. I almost wondered if she was praying, somewhere beneath the terror, to whatever god she believed would still answer a woman like her. Perhaps, I thought, even her god had grown tired of her arrogance.

Sebastian took two fast, panicked steps around the edge of his mahogany desk, his hands raised in a rare, humiliating gesture of surrender. "Jaxx, stop this madness! I am order... no, I’m asking you! Stop! You’ll regret this for the rest of your life! I swear to God, Jaxx, just let her breathe!"

Finally, I turned my dark eyes on him. Just one slow, sideways glance. Ice-cold, completely unblinking, and teeming with unhinged brutality, daring him to take one more step toward me.

The silent threat in my stare was louder than any thunderous scream, and for the briefest moment, I saw the truth settle over his face... the truth that he had raised a son capable of exactly this kind of ruin, and that son now stood in his study, holding his wife’s life in one careless hand.

Something like grief flickered behind his eyes, quickly buried beneath fear, as though he finally understood what all those years of denial had cost him. I almost wanted to laugh. He looked like a man watching his own sins finally come home to collect their due. It was almost beautiful, in a terrible way, to see him finally understand what it felt like to be powerless in his own house.

Sebastian froze mid-stride. His throat bobbed violently in a heavy, nervous swallow. His broad fists slowly unclenched, his arms dropping limp to his sides as he stood there, paralyzed, watching his wife suffocate.

That silence... the absolute silence of his spineless cowardice, was far louder than Matilda’s wet, desperate gasps. It told me everything I needed to know about the man who had once claimed to be untouchable. A man who ruled empires with a whisper but couldn’t summon the courage to save the woman he’d married.

I filed that silence away too, another entry in the long ledger of his failures. A ledger I had been keeping, it seemed, since I was old enough to understand what abandonment meant.

"You should turn your head, old woman," I purred directly against her burning skin, my voice thick with cold, ruthless mockery. "If you want to direct all that filthy insult at anyone in this room, then turn to your stupid, pathetic husband standing right over there."

Matilda’s pupils dilated in pure terror, her hands faltering against my wrist as she listened to my voice cut through her dying pride.

"He’s the one who deceived my mother," I spat out, every word a jagged blade dripping with venom. "He lied straight to her face, swore to her that he was single, fed her fairy tales, and cheated on you for years behind your back. You sit on your high horse with your pearls and your fancy mansion, pointing fingers at her, when you should be reflecting on your damn self, Matilda. You were never enough for him. Not then, and certainly not now."

I shifted my grip slightly, forcing her to look into the dead, unfeeling depths of my eyes. There was nothing left in me to soften for her sake, no shred of mercy I felt obligated to extend to a woman who had spent years pretending my existence was an inconvenient rumor.

Every cold word I gave her felt like payment on a debt decades overdue. I had waited a lifetime to say these things, and now that the moment had come, the words tasted like something close to relief. I thought of every Christmas I had spent watching this family from a distance through windows I was never invited past, every birthday she had ensured I would never celebrate beneath this roof. The words came easier for it.

"You came into this family thinking you were royalty, but you’re just a bitter, insecure woman occupying a house built on lies," I whispered coldly. "You two miserable bastards deserve each other. You deserve every single second of the hell you’ve made for yourselves."

Sebastian winced as if I had struck him across the face, his pale jaw clenching tight, but he didn’t dare utter a single word to defend her. He just stood there, flushed, furious, and utterly helpless, a king dethroned in the very room where he had once ruled without question.

I almost wanted him to fight back, if only to give me a reason to unleash the rest of what I’d carried for years. Some hollow part of me even hoped he would, just so the years of silence between us might finally mean something. Some part of me had always wanted him to earn the anger I carried, rather than simply confirm it through his silence.

"You should be grateful..." I whispered against Matilda’s ear, tightening my grip one last excruciating time until her eyes rolled backward and her legs kicked weakly against the rug, "...deeply fucking grateful that I was in a decent mood before I drove up here today."

The last word dripped like toxic acid.

Her vision was clearly swimming, her frantic eyes unfocused, the entire weight of her lifelong arrogance collapsing beneath the simple, brutal reality of an oxygen-deprived brain. For all her pearls and her pride, she was just flesh and blood and failing breath, same as anyone else. It struck me, in that instant, how thin the line truly was between a queen and a corpse.

And then, without an ounce of care, without a single shred of warmth or hesitation, I unclasped my fingers and dropped her roughly to the ground.

Matilda hit the cold, unforgiving marble floor with a heavy, humiliating crash.

She crumpled into a pathetic heap, clutching her bruised, purple neck, gasping and wheezing violently as air rushed back into her burning lungs. The impact snapped the thread of her expensive pearl necklace, sending dozens of smooth white beads exploding across the floor, bouncing and skittering in every direction like the shattered fragments of her pretentious pride.

Sebastian rushed forward, dropping to his knees beside her, wrapping his arms around her trembling shoulders, his eyes wild with a mixture of shock, rage, and profound humiliation. "Matilda! Jesus Christ... are you alright? Can you hear me?"

Matilda couldn’t answer. She could only cough, tears streaming down her ruined makeup, her face pressed against the cold stone, trembling uncontrollably as she gasped for air. Watching them huddled together on the floor, I felt nothing resembling guilt... only a distant, clinical satisfaction at having finally shattered the illusion they had both hidden behind for so long.

Two people who had spent years pretending their marriage was a fortress now lay exposed as nothing more than rubble. I almost wanted to remember this moment forever, to bottle the image of them broken on the floor where they had once stood so tall.

It felt, in some strange way, like the closing of a wound I had carried since childhood... one that had never properly healed, only scarred over crooked.

I stood over them both, towering like an absolute god of ruin. The dark smirk was entirely gone now, replaced by an expression of sharp, lethal steel. I looked down at the great Sebastian Sinclair kneeling on the floor beside his hyperventilating wife, the illusion of their grand empire completely demolished.

My voice cut through the heavy room with absolute finality.

"And just for the record..." I paused, letting the suffocating silence choke both of them one last time. "...my mother was a thousand times the human being you could ever dream of being. She was better than ten of you combined."

Matilda’s tear-glossed eyes shot up to meet mine from the floor, a chaotic, pathetic cocktail of raw rage, terror, and deep humiliation dancing in her gaze. Sebastian clamped his teeth together so hard his jaw muscles trembled, his face burning pale and red, but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t dare challenge me.

I casually reached up, straightened the collar of my black shirt, and brushed a speck of dust off my shoulder, as though nothing more than a minor inconvenience had just occurred. I turned my back on the pathetic scene, stepping over the scattered pearls as I walked toward the heavy oak doors.

My hand wrapped around the cool brass knob, turning it smoothly. This time, no one dared to yell. No one dared to step forward. No one dared to stop me.

The sprawling study was dead silent, save for Matilda’s broken, desperate coughs echoing off the marble and the slow, heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, marking every agonizing second of their absolute defeat.

Without sparing either of them a single backward glance, I opened the door and left them drowning in it. Somewhere behind me, the clock kept ticking, indifferent to the wreckage I had made of their perfect, lying lives.

For the first time in years, I felt something almost like peace settle over the storm still raging inside me. Whatever came next, I thought, at least I would no longer carry this alone in silence - the truth was finally out, scattered across that marble floor like broken pearls, impossible to gather back into anything resembling their old, comfortable lies.