Chapter 234: Devil's Last String Broke

The words hung in the dim backstage air like poison fumes.

For the first time in his ruthless, calculating existence, Damian Sterling did not move. His mind, usually a fortress of cold strategy, suffered a catastrophic, blinding fracture. The breath stalled in his throat, his chest caving inward as an invisible blade carved through his ribs. The memory of the divorce—the signature on the paper, the icy silence with which she had vanished across the Atlantic two years ago—replayed behind his eyes in violent, agonizing flashes.

He was completely, utterly paralyzed.

Vivian saw the crack in the iron armor. She had waited years for this exact second of ruin.

Moving with practiced, serpent-like grace, Vivian closed the remaining inches between them. Her white silk dress brushed against his tailored trousers, her delicate hands coming up to cup his rigid jaw. Before the titan could register her proximity, before his instincts could command his hands to throw her off, Vivian rose onto her toes and pressed her painted red lips firmly against his.

A sickening, wet gasp echoed through the museum speakers, followed by Vivian’s breathless murmur right against his skin: “She destroyed you, Damian. Let me heal it.”

”Damian!”

The heavy backstage door was violently kicked open, slamming into the concrete wall with a thunderous crack.

Julian burst through the threshold, his tuxedo jacket flying open, his face pale with frantic, furious adrenaline.

”Damian, the goddamn mic is live!” Julian roared, lunging forward. He grabbed Vivian by her white shoulder and violently shoved her backward into the metal scaffolding, ripping her away from Damian. “The entire room heard every single word!”

The physical violence of Julian’s intervention finally shattered the paralysis gripping Damian’s veins.

Damian blinked, his obsidian eyes clearing, instantly blazing with lethal, unhinged fury. With a savage jerk of his arm, he ripped the hidden lavalier microphone off his lapel, snapping the wire in two and throwing the transmitter onto the concrete floor, stomping it to pieces beneath his polished heel.

At that exact second, the motorized backstage pulley groaned.

Arthur Pendleton, trembling in terror at the master switchboard across the hall, hit the emergency reset—and the colossal, velvet center curtain parted with a heavy, rushing whoosh.

Blinding white spotlights flooded the wings, washing over Damian, Julian, and Vivian stumbling against the pipes.

The entire Engelhard Court stood laid bare before them.

Five hundred people—mayors, foreign dignitaries, Wall Street titans, and society matrons—were staring up at the stage in petrified, suffocating horror. Flashbulbs from the press pen erupted in violent, deafening strobes, capturing the scene of the unbuttoned billionaire, the woman in white beside him, and the wreckage of a broadcast scandal.

Damian didn’t see the crowd. He didn’t see the blinding white lights or the flashing cameras.

His towering frame locked rigid as his obsidian eyes cut through the glare, sweeping straight past the VIP tables, past the central aisle, and landing dead-center on the back of the hall.

Standing beneath the towering marble arch of the rotunda was Anastasia.

Clara stood beside her, hands pressed over her mouth in tears, but Ana was motionless. In her liquid-black gown, her skin was pale as carved marble, her hazel eyes wide, shattered, and bleeding with raw, agonizing betrayal as she stared at the man on the stage—and the red lipstick smeared at the corner of his lips.

The grand auditorium was a tomb of held breath and flashing strobe lights.

Damian didn’t look at the mayor. He didn’t look at Arthur Pendleton, cowering by the stage rigging, nor did he spare a single glance for Vivian Stark, who stood frozen in the glare of the spotlights, watching her triumph morph into something violently unpredictable.

Damian raised the back of his hand and wiped his mouth with savage, brutal force—erasing every trace of the crimson stain from his skin.

Then he moved.

He didn’t take the carpeted steps. In one fluid, terrifying motion, Damian vaulted over the edge of the elevated stage, his heavy dress shoes hitting the polished marble floor with a dull, thunderous crack that made the front-row patrons recoil in their seats.

”Damian!” Julian shouted from the wings, already moving down the side stairs, barking orders at Henry and the Sterling private detail to form a perimeter.

Damian heard nothing. The roar in his skull had swallowed every sound in the universe except the fragile, shallow breath of the woman standing a hundred feet away.

He marched straight down the grand central aisle.

The crowd parted in frantic waves, chairs scraping against stone as billionaires and diplomats scrambled to get out of his direct path. Flashbulbs went off in frantic, blinding bursts from the press pen, reporters shoving forward against the velvet cords, yelling over one another in a frenzy of questions.

Damian walked through the flashes like a walking storm of pure violence, his obsidian eyes fixed unblinkingly on Anastasia.

She stood beneath the shadow of the rotunda arch, looking like a shattered queen in her midnight-black silk. Her hands were clutched against her abdomen in a silent, instinctive gesture of agonizing memory, her chest heaving as if the air in the room had turned to glass.

When he reached her, the sheer heat and force of his presence hit her like a gale.

Ana took half a step backward, her lips parting to speak, her hazel eyes glistening with raw, unspeakable torment.

Damian didn’t give her the chance to run. He didn’t offer an apology, and he didn’t utter a single syllable for the vultures to feast on.

His massive hand reached out, his long, calloused fingers wrapping around her wrist and locking into her palm with an iron, bruising certainty.

Ana gasped at the sudden, burning shock of his touch, but before her fingers could pull away, Damian hauled her forward, tucking her arm firmly against his side and using his broad, towering frame as a physical shield between her and the five hundred pairs of staring eyes.

”Move,” Damian rumbled, his voice low and vibrating with a deadly frequency that caused the nearest onlookers to instinctively press their backs against the wall.

He didn’t wait. Holding her hand in a grip that defied the entire world, Damian swept her through the brass doors of the Great Hall.

The heavy glass slammed shut behind them, cutting off the gasp of high society.

Outside, the October rain was coming down hard against the stone steps of Fifth Avenue. The barricades groaned as photographers lunged, their umbrellas flipping in the wind, screaming her name, screaming about the child.

Damian didn’t slow his stride by half an inch. He kept his arm clamped around her, shielding her bare back from the cold drizzle, his body an impenetrable fortress as he brought her down the wet carpet stairs in four long, heavy strides.

Henry already had the rear door of the armored Maybach wrenched open.

Damian guided her inside, following immediately behind her and slamming the heavy door shut with a concussive thud that sealed them into suffocating, tinted silence.

Outside, the press swarm pounded against the glass.

Inside the shadowed leather interior of the car, the silence was deafening.

Damian sat beside her, his chest heaving in ragged, violent breaths. He slowly turned his head to look at her, his dark eyes wide, feral, and hollowed out by a terror he had never known in his life.

His gaze dropped to her trembling hands, still clutched defensively against her stomach, before rising to meet her devastated eyes.

”Anastasia,” Damian choked out, his voice cracked and stripped entirely bare of his imperial armor. “Tell me it was a lie.”

The heavy, tinted glass of the Maybach muffled the violent roar of the Manhattan rain, reducing the flashing strobes of the paparazzi to ghostly, distant flickers.

Inside, the silence was suffocating.

Damian’s breath came in ragged, uneven hitches, his massive chest straining against the tailored silk of his tuxedo shirt. His obsidian eyes, usually so calculating and devoid of vulnerability, were wide and wild, searching her face with a frantic, desperate hunger.

”Anastasia,” he rasped again, his voice raw, stripped of all imperial command. “Tell me it was a lie.”

Ana did not move.

Her hands remained pressed against her lower abdomen, her fingers clutching the liquid-black silk of her gown as if holding together the fragments of a shattered body. She looked at him—at the ruthless titan of Sterling Global, at the man who had dragged her back into his world by force—and her lips parted slightly, but not a single sound emerged.

No denial. No defensive anger. No tears.

Only a hollow, hollow silence that echoed louder than any scream.

Her hazel eyes, wide and glassy, simply held his gaze, stripped entirely bare. In that agonizing stillness, the truth laid its rotting weight between them. The sterile clinic in Zurich. The bitter cold of that European winter. The unbearable ache of losing the only piece of him she had left, completely alone in the dark.

Damian stared at her.

Second by second, the desperate fire in his dark eyes flickered, dimmed, and extinguished into cold, dead ash. The color drained from his face, leaving his sharp jaw carved of gray stone. The silence was his verdict.

She wasn’t denying it. It had happened.

And it had happened because of him.

A terrifying stillness settled over Damian’s towering frame, more frightening than any explosion of violence he had ever unleashed. The suffocating heat of his presence vanished, replaced by an arctic, paralyzing vacuum.

He didn’t touch her. He didn’t ask another question.

Damian reached forward with rigid fingers, pressing the intercom button connecting to the front cabin.

”Pull over, Henry,” Damian commanded, his voice dead, devoid of inflection or humanity. “Now.”

”Sir, we’re on Fifth Avenue, the press convoy is—”

”Pull the car over.”