"Aghh—!"
An ugly cry ripped from his throat, hoarse and pitiful, as Danica's fingers clamped around his neck like a vice of vengeance.
He writhed beneath her grip, limbs flailing in a frantic display of uselessness. A man reduced to a pathetic heap of bones and cowardice.
She didn't blink. Her dark red nails—sharp, manicured weapons—dug deeper into the fragile flesh of his neck, and with a calculated twist of her wrist, she brought him to his knees. One hand. That was all it took. A single, elegant hand wielding the power of a thousand ruthless business moves.
Danica tilted her head, lips curling in cold amusement as she stared down at him. "The moment you underestimated me—and my empire—was the beginning of your downfall." Her voice was ice over fire, smooth but sharp, and laced with the kind of stillness that comes before a storm rips a world into halves.
He whimpered. Adorable.
A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, trailing shame in its path. His once-dominant eyes—now wide and pleading—searched hers for mercy.
She had none.
She never did for men like him.
"Do you want to know what your biggest mistake was?" Her smile darkened.
He opened his mouth, attempting to form a word. But the only sound that escaped his throat was a rasping wheeze, a final attempt at survival.
Danica leaned in, her lips ghosted his skin, and her breath was warm and wicked against his cheek. Her proximity wasn't comfort—it was torture.
"It was the day you opened that ugly little mouth of yours and polluted the air with your mediocrity," she hissed. "The day you decided that a woman—me—wasn't built for power. That we're too soft, too delicate, too emotional to sit at the head of the table. That we don't belong at the top." Her voice spiked now, venom coated in elegance. "How dare you try to reduce me to anything less than a goddamn queen?"
Her grip tightened.
"You stood there, puffed up with entitlement, and had the audacity to question what I was capable of?" Her voice was twice as stern and dangerous as before. "How dare you assume that I'd bow to you—when I was born to bury people like you?"
He made one final, feeble twitch before his eyes rolled back into his skull. She released him, letting his body fall like a bloodied syringe tossed aside after a brutal, unforgiving operation. Danica straightened up, not a single strand of her obsidian-black hair out of place. She looked untouched by violence—unfazed by rage—as if she could walk onto a magazine cover and into a battlefield without blinking. She was elegance forged in fire, beauty sharpened by betrayal.
"Die slowly, bastard," she muttered under her breath, staring at his unconscious body lying sprawled on the floor. Those raw red fingerprints wrapped around his throat? They were satisfying.
Danica Clarke. The name whispered behind boardroom doors and shouted in headlines that tried to capture her brilliance but never quite could. The most feared, most revered woman in the business world. Part enigma, part storm. She wasn't just power in stilettos—she was the battlefield.
She was a genius cloaked in ice and fire, the kind of beauty that stopped conversations and the kind of mind that ended careers. Lethal. Addictive. A walking contradiction—hot enough to make you stare, cold enough to make you bleed.
At twenty-five, while the world around her drowned in bottomless brunches and late-night regrets, Danica built Dominion Group from nothing. A product-based global empire that now bent markets to her will. She didn't chase hangovers or hollow lovers.
She turned and walked out of the room. The sound of her heels sent the warning of her arrival to the man, who had been waiting for her outside the room. His manager. Paul Williams.
"Boss," he bowed and immediately straightened up as she approached. "If at—"
"Clear the room." She thundered over him, throwing a stone-cold face. It was impossible to decode her.
Even before he could mutter anything, she walked past him, and he sighed. He was accustomed to this kind of treatment—the kind where your voice was background noise, your thoughts irrelevant, and your job simple: clean the mess. The mess, more often than not, is drenched in blood and bruised egos. The moment he stepped into the room and took in the aftermath, it registered as easily as a Monday morning coffee—routine, bitter, and necessary.
The chief executor of Marinee Corporate was lying flat on the floor like a puppet with severed strings, his powerful charm was reduced to rubble, and the purple marks around his neck signified the intensity of wrath with which he had dealt.
Letting out an exasperated sigh, Paul bent on his one knee and took a closer look at the chief's body.
Is he dead? He mused.
And ugly part of him hoped—yes.