Chapter 233: Betrayed The Devil

Vivian didn’t follow the line of guests funneling toward the auditorium seating.

Her pearl white gown rustled with calculated elegance as she slipped through the heavy velvet cordon, bypassing the public floor entirely. Arthur Pendleton was already waiting beside the mahogany backstage door, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. With a discreet nod and trembling hands, the curator swiped his security pass, letting Vivian slip into the private green room corridor where Damian was waiting to be mic’d for the donor address.

On the technical console in the backstage booth, the red indicator switch flipped quietly from Standby to Live Master.

Out in the grand hall, the smooth jazz quartet faded into silence. The hundreds of seated patrons, along with Clara, Julian, and Anastasia standing near the grand marble arches, watched the stage technician adjust the twin podium microphones.

Then, through the state-of-the-art acoustic sound system mounted across the colossal museum ceiling, a soft rustle echoed.

Followed by a woman’s purring, familiar voice.

”You look magnificent under the lights, Damian. You always did.”

Clara froze, her champagne flute halting inches from her lips. Julian’s head snapped toward the stage speakers, his easy posture instantly vanishing into rigid shock.

Across the Great Hall, a suffocating silence washed over high society.

Behind the velvet curtain wings, Damian turned with lethal slowness. His obsidian eyes swept over Vivian standing in the dimly lit corridor, her white dress looking like a shroud in the shadows, her lips curved into a sharp, victorious smile.

”You have three seconds to leave this hallway before I have security throw you out into the street,” Damian rumbled, his voice low, gravelly, and vibrating through the hidden microphone pinned to his lapel… booming across the auditorium with terrifying clarity.

Vivian didn’t flinch. She took a slow, deliberate step closer, her voice laced with honeyed, theatrical grief that filled every corner of the museum floor.

”Why do you still defend her, Damian? Why do you protect a woman whose blind, pathetic jealousy ruined you?”

Vivian tilted her head, her tone carrying that exact, venomous cruelty from the memorial corridor two years ago.

”She walked out on your marriage because she convinced herself you were sleeping with another woman. She looked at you carrying your own collapsed, grieving sister through the rain… carrying Valerie into your father’s home… and like a foolish, insecure child, she accused you of betrayal. She demanded a divorce over a phantom lie… and lost your unborn child in the dark because she was too proud to look you in the eyes.”

Every drop of color drained from Anastasia’s face.

She stood beneath the museum’s crystal chandelier, the world around her collapsing into a deafening, ringing silence as the darkest, most agonizing secret of her life was broadcast to every titan, board member, and vulture in Manhattan.

A suffocating, petrified silence held the Engelhard Court in a vice.

Governors, federal judges, foreign ambassadors, and Manhattan’s oldest dynasties sat frozen at their white-linen tables, champagne glasses hovering midway to their mouths. No one dared breathe. The hum of the state-of-the-art Bose speakers mounted high in the stone vaulted ceiling made every rasp of breath backstage sound larger than life, filling the museum like thunder.

Standing in the rotunda archway, Anastasia did not blink.

Her blood ran ice-cold, the roar of blood in her ears drowning out the muted gasps spreading like a contagion across the hall. The concealed bruise on her throat throbbed beneath the layers of powder, but her spine remained ramrod straight. Beside her, Clara’s hand shot out, grasping Ana’s forearm in horror, while Julian’s jaw tightened into iron, his eyes darting frantically toward the technician’s booth.

”Cut the goddamn audio!” Julian hissed through his teeth, already moving to signal security.

Backstage, beneath the industrial rigging and the dim amber floodlights, the air was toxic.

Damian did not flinch. His towering silhouette loomed over Vivian like an executioner, but behind the impenetrable granite mask of his face, a terrifying fissure cracked open in his obsidian eyes. The words unborn child hit him not as a secret, but as a physical hammer blow against his sternum.

A low, dark scoff rumbled from his throat, vibrating through the live transmitter pinned to his tuxedo lapel.

”You are delusional, Vivian,” Damian rumbled, his voice dripping with venomous disgust, carrying into every corner of the ballroom. “You stand in the dark fabricating filth because you are desperate for an audience. My wife never lost a child. She walked away from this marriage because of your manipulations… not because she mistook my own blood for a mistress.”

Vivian’s soft, mocking laughter crackled through the speakers, sharp as broken glass.

”Delusional?” Vivian purred, taking a slow step toward him, her white silk rustling in the stillness. “Is that what you tell yourself to sleep at night, Damian? You think you know everything that happens in your kingdom, yet you were completely blind to what she buried.”

Out in the hall, society women raised manicured hands to their lips, glancing across the room toward Anastasia standing in the shadows of the mezzanine.

Vivian’s voice dropped into an intimate, razor-edged whisper that the microphones picked up with crystal fidelity.

”She didn’t tell you, did she?” Vivian taunted, savoring every second of the kill. “She hid it. She bled in an empty clinic in Zurich three months after you signed the decree, weeping over a phantom life you never even knew existed… all because she thought you had thrown her away for another woman. She hated you so much she kept that secret up until now.”

Damian’s large hands clenched into fists, the veins along his forearms bulging against the cuffs of his Tom Ford jacket. “Silence yourself before I snap your neck right on this floor.”

”You don’t have to take my word for it, Damian,” Vivian purred, her tone dripping with cruel, unvarnished triumph. “She is standing right out there beneath the chandeliers. Go on. Walk onto that stage, look into the eyes of the precious wife you parade like a prize, and ask Anastasia yourself. I bet my life she won’t be able to deny a single word.”