Chapter 400: CH : 389 So You’d Invest?

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The low cut of her designer dress plunged recklessly, offering a deliberate, calculated distraction: the soft, full curves of her breasts rising with every shallow breath, the shadowed valley between them promising more than the fabric was willing to hide.

Her excitement was palpable, almost electric in the narrow space between them.

"This isn’t about a serial killer."

"No?"

"It’s about someone who never had a chance."

Her voice lost its edge. "A little girl who spent her whole life being used, beaten, abandoned... until there was nothing left except rage."

She held his gaze. "Everyone remembers what she became." A beat passed. "I want them to wonder how she got there."

Silence settled between them.

Marvin didn’t speak. He simply watched her. She wasn’t selling the role anymore. She believed it.

"You couldn’t have picked a harder role if you tried."

"That’s exactly why I picked it."

"Or maybe you picked it because you think an ugly role comes with a gold statue."

The words landed between them. Charlize didn’t answer immediately. She looked at him, almost offended. "If all I wanted was an Oscar," she said quietly, "I’d wait for someone else to hand me the right script."

She leaned down even more, closing the final inches until her lips hovered just above his ear, her breath warm and soft against his skin. The deliberate dip of her body made the neckline of her dress fall further open, the silk whispering against her breasts as they nearly brushed his chest. "I’m doing this because I can’t stop thinking about her."

"That’s not the same thing."

"No."

"It’s much worse."

"Exactly." Marvin held her gaze.

There it was.

Not desperation.

Conviction. Most actors fell in love with the applause. She had fallen in love with the role.

"You realise," Marvin said, "that if you make this film the way you’re describing it, a lot of people are going to hate it." Finally, he set his glass on a nearby table. "Maybe."

The single word made her shoulders ease. She looked at him with wide, pleading eyes, hoping to spark the soul of the literary genius who had penned *The Sixth Sense*. She expected him to resonate with the darkness.

Marvin remained completely indifferent. The aura around him didn’t warm; it turned to ice. He looked at her leaning posture, entirely unswayed by her physical enthusiasm or her artistic passion.

Then he continued. "But belief doesn’t pay for production."

Her expression stiffened. The smile faltered.

"Theatres don’t run on conviction," Marvin continued evenly. "Distributors don’t write cheques simply because a director believes in a story." He tapped the screenplay once, his gaze steady. "As a wide release, this film is almost guaranteed to lose money."

Silence fell over the room.

The hope that had carried her through the pitch wavered. She had prepared herself for resistance, perhaps a negotiation on the budget. She hadn’t expected him to dismiss the business case so surgically, with such quiet certainty.

Marvin watched her for a moment. She was undeniably beautiful. Driven. This South African beauty had been a known entity in the Hollywood underground long before she began securing mainstream traction. She was a survivor who rubbed shoulders with influential people, brilliantly weaponizing her own tragic history—her mother shooting her abusive father in self-defense—to add a layer of dark, untouchable mystique to her public image.

Everyone in the inner circles knew exactly how hard she had clawed her way up the brutal Hollywood ladder.

Marvin respected her competence. He respected anyone who kicked the door down instead of waiting for someone to open it.

But respect wasn’t desire. He had absolutely no interest in her beyond an appreciation of her beauty and drive.

Charlize was a shark, and he didn’t want a power struggle. He looked at her and saw a woman who viewed sex and relationships as casual, disposable currency. With his foreknowledge, he knew exactly how she intended to live her life in the coming decades—thriving in a performative, post-woke Hollywood, casually fucking around, no idea of marriage, adopting children only to transition them to fit the era’s bizarre social politics. That entire chaotic, hyper-independent mindset repulsed him.

He didn’t demand absolute purity. He was a demon; he knew the statistical probability of finding a virgin in this town was practically zero for older women. Any woman her age was going to have a history, and he didn’t mind breaking through the lingering shadows of past lovers.

But he despised women who were open about it, who casually surrendered themselves to the revolving door of the industry.

Compared to Charlize’s sharpened edges, women like Nicole and Diana were clean, moldable canvases. Yes, they had been married, but they were deeply discreet. Their entire lives had revolved around one or two men. If Tom Cruise hadn’t locked Nicole down early, perhaps she would have evolved into a shark too, but hypotheticals didn’t matter. It was a man’s strength to fulfill a woman so completely that she forgot anyone else had ever existed.

And then there were the rare anomalies, like Paris. Despite a tabloid reputation built on wild, manufactured scandals, the seventeen-year-old heiress was entirely untouched. She had shocked him. It was unreasonable to expect an heiress of her status to be a virgin in this town, yet there she was—waiting for something real.

Shocking indeed, especially with a boyfriend in the picture at 14!

In all of his three lives, he’d met countless people who spoke of love as trust.

As freedom. As choosing one another every day. He had never understood that.

Not completely.

Perhaps he never would.

The demon within him had survived death itself.

Some instincts refused to disappear.

There were parts of Marvin that neither of his human lives had managed to change.

Possession was one of them.

If he ever decided a woman was his, the decision was final. There was no courtship in his mind, no invisible competition with other men, no room for uncertainty. From that moment on, he instinctively regarded anyone who approached her with desire as an intruder trespassing on something that already belonged to him.

It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t healthy. It was simply how he had always been.

His standards were equally uncompromising.

He had never expected perfection and purity. Life was too messy for that, and even mortals deserved the grace of experience. But there was a world of difference between a genuine past and someone who drifted through fleeting pleasures without ever attaching meaning to them.

Someone who treated love—or desire—as something disposable, passed casually from one pair of hands to another.

He had never found that attractive.

Nor could he imagine raising another man’s family.

The children he dreamed of would be his own, born from the woman who chose to spend eternity at his side. Anything else left a bitter taste he had never been able to swallow.

The maternal devotion of his women belonged entirely to him. Their bodies, their time, and their boundless affection were not to be divided or shared with the remnants of past men.

He understood exactly what that made him.

He could recognise every flaw without feeling the slightest urge to change it.

Perhaps that was the most frightening part.

He simply accepted it as another piece of his self, as ordinary to him as breathing.

There had only ever been one exception.

Diana.

By every conviction he held, she should have been impossible.

She carried a life that could never truly be separated from her—an impossible obligation, and two young sons who would always remain the centre of her world.

Years later, Marvin would have walked away without hesitation.

Instead...

He had done the one thing he never imagined himself capable of. He had abandoned his own rules. Not because they had become any less important.

Because she had. Some people arrived in your life and quietly rewrote convictions that had stood unchallenged for centuries.

Diana had done exactly that.

Her soul—a fragile, impossibly radiant, beautiful thing trapped inside a breathtaking, aristocratic shell—had shattered his rules. He had claimed her, sons and all, accepting the mortal complications simply because a life without her was a little more bleak to him.

Even now, the thought unsettled him. She remained the first exception. She would also be the last.

That certainty settled over him with the same quiet finality as everything else he believed.

He knew exactly what that made him.

Selfish. Egotistical. A staggering hypocrite. Controlling... Deeply misogynistic.

He demanded an absolute exclusivity that he had absolutely no intention of offering in return. He would sleep with whoever he pleased, but the women he claimed were his and his alone.

There was no noble excuse for it, no convenient modern philosophy to justify the double standard. It was simply the core of his nature.

Even among demons, his possessiveness was considered excessive, but now combined with two human souls, it bordered on psychotic. Once his heart acknowledged a woman as his, the very thought of another man touching her awakened an instinct cold enough to drown reason in blood. He would literally kill them before he let them leave or touch another man. It wasn’t human love, which preached freedom and trust. It was ownership. Primitive. Ancient. Ugly.

But human morality didn’t apply to him, and he didn’t care to pretend it did. In exchange for their absolute love, their isolation, and their devotion, he gave them everything. He fulfilled their every desire, smothered them in endless wealth, love and wildest pleasure, and granted them the ultimate prize: a perpetual, immortal life at their physical peak.

His attention returned to the woman leaning across from him.

Whatever life she had lived before today, whatever choices shaped her, they were none of his concern. She wasn’t his. Which meant he felt nothing beyond admiration.

Professional. Beautiful. Determined.

None of it mattered.

She had never crossed the invisible line in his heart.

Without that...

She remained exactly what she was.

An actress.

Nothing more.

"My opinion has nothing to do with your talent," Marvin said evenly. "I’m talking about the market. Audiences decide whether a film lives or dies, and they aren’t always kind to the films that deserve it."

Charlize held his gaze for a beat.

Nothing.

No lingering look. No awkward pause. No boyish attempt to impress her.

Just a calm, almost clinical assessment of her film.

She had deliberately leaned closer during the conversation. Most men noticed. Most men reacted.

Most executives she’d pitched spent the first few minutes trying to impress her—or letting themselves be impressed.

Marvin did neither.

He listened.

He questioned.

He never took his eyes off the project.

For the first time that evening, she couldn’t quite read him.

A flicker of disappointment crossed her face before she hid it behind a practiced smile.

’Seriously?’

’Nothing?’

For the first time in years, her confidence took a small hit.

She had expected resistance to the project.

She hadn’t expected complete indifference to her.

’Is this kid... a flamingo?’

Charlize, sensing the absolute lack of sexual tension coming from him, felt disappointed... She had secretly hoped to catch his romantic interest to secure the bag.

It was the only explanation she could come up with.

Marvin, oblivious—or simply uninterested—continued as if the silence had never existed.

"That doesn’t mean the film can’t succeed."

Charlize straightened slightly.

"It isn’t built to become a worldwide blockbuster. It doesn’t need to be." He spoke. "If it’s made well, premieres at the right festivals, and builds momentum through awards season, a limited theatrical run should recover the budget. After that, home video and DVD sales can turn it into a profitable picture."

"You think it could make its money back?"

"Possibly."

"That’s a lot more optimistic than everyone else I’ve spoken to."

"I didn’t say optimistic." A faint smile touched his lips. "I said possible."

Hope flickered across her face. "So you’d invest?"

Marvin shook his head. "I said the numbers can work." He picked up his glass. "Whether I finance it is a different conversation."

She waited.

Charlize’s excitement cooled, though she listened more carefully than before.

"Let’s talk after the premiere."

"Why then?"

"Because if you’re serious about chasing the Academy, this film won’t just demand money."

His eyes settled on her. "It’s going to ask you to give up the image you’ve spent years building."

"You mean gain the weight."

"Among other things." Marvin let the words hang for a moment. "Once you make that choice, there’s no walking it back. This film will ask for more than your time. It’ll ask for pieces of you that won’t come back."

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