novelraw Chapter 223- Thalia become the Heir?!
Chapter 223- Thalia become the Heir?!
Her eyes dropped, almost involuntarily, directly to his lips. They stayed there for exactly one devastating heartbeat too long.
She yanked her gaze back up, her cheeks flushing a furious crimson.
"Because unlike you," she bit out, releasing his hair and taking a sharp step backward, "I have a heart." She turned away from him with a violent pivot, her hair sweeping over her shoulder. "Some of us actually care about warning people before they get blindsided."
Cruxius let out a genuine, low, rumbling chuckle. "You were angry at me, weren’t you?" he said, the amusement in his tone rich and entirely unrepentant.
Sugar didn’t dignify that with a verbal answer. She simply turned towards the spot where her portal had closed, raising her hand to summon it again.
Then her eyes dropped. Completely involuntarily.
His cock, which had been lying entirely limp and heavy against his thigh mere moments ago, was now visibly, shamelessly twitching. The massive, thick shaft stirred with a lazy, deeply smug pulse, as if the monster between his legs had its own, entirely separate sense of humor.
*badump.*
Sugar stared at it for exactly two full seconds.
"You’re still as perverted as you always were," she said flatly, her voice entirely strangled.
A new portal bloomed open in front of her, swirling and crackling with cool light. She stepped directly towards it, entirely intending to vanish with the last shreds of her dignity firmly intact.
"Can you at least..." Cruxius called after her, his voice achingly casual, deeply nonchalant, "not go away before sucking me off?"
The portal froze.
Sugar turned her head with the slow, impossibly lethal deliberateness of a woman who was one genuinely bad answer away from committing a capital crime.
She stared at him with a glare that could have frozen an entire ocean solid.
"In your dreams," she said, each word sharp as a blade. "I do not care about you. I do not care about anything you do. Not even an old, desperate woman who had completely lost her sense of taste would want to sleep with you."
Before he could so much as open his mouth, she stepped directly through the portal.
It snapped shut behind her like a closing jaw, leaving the hallway completely, absolutely silent.
Cruxius sat there for a long, quiet moment, staring at the empty space where she had been standing.
Then he reached up, slowly ruffled his own dark hair with his large hand, and let out a deeply, genuinely baffled exhale.
"Why the hell did she come to begin with?" he muttered to the empty hallway, his voice carrying the completely genuine bewilderment of a man who had conquered armies, broken queens, and rewritten the laws of reality itself—yet found himself utterly, hopelessly defeated by the fundamental, unbreakable complexity of a woman’s motivations.
He shook his head once, leaning back again.
’I really cannot understand women,’ he thought plainly, pressing his head back against the expensive sofa cushion and slowly closing his eyes. ’Not a single one of them.’
He finally, genuinely began to drift. The exhaustion wasn’t physical—his vampire bloodline and the Healing Blessing had already thoroughly handled that—but the sheer, relentless mental taxation of managing an endless parade of impossible women was something even the most powerful supernatural bloodline couldn’t entirely fix.
His breathing slowed. The hallway was silent. His eyes stayed closed.
*Buzz. Buzz.*
His phone vibrated against the glass coffee table with two short, cheerful pulses.
Cruxius cracked one eye open, crimson iris glinting with resigned irritation. He reached out without sitting up, his thick fingers lazily swiping the screen toward his face.
It was a message. The sender’s name made a slow, recognizing smile curve the very corner of his lips.
Jenny.
None other than the sweet, predictable little sister of Thalia. He could practically picture her sending the message—probably wearing something entirely too expensive, sitting in some ridiculously decorated dining room, with absolutely no idea of the chaos her older sister had been continuously involved in.
He read the message.
*’Hi, it’s me. Mother was wanting for you to come at dinner.’*
Cruxius stared at the text. Then he let out a slow, richly amused chuckle, the sound rolling through the empty hallway with a dark, knowing resonance.
"Ah," he murmured, entirely to himself. "This gold digger."
He tossed the phone aside with a careless flick of his wrist, sending it bouncing lightly across the leather sofa cushion. He closed his eyes again, entirely dismissing the dinner invitation in exactly the same amount of time it had taken him to read it.
His eyelids had barely fallen shut for the third time tonight when his phone rang again.
The sharp, electronic ringtone cut through the silence with a brutal, completely unforgiving efficiency.
Cruxius’s jaw tightened visibly. A low, deeply frustrated sound came from somewhere behind his clenched teeth.
He reached out with his eyes still firmly shut, fingers blindly finding the phone and lifting it from the sofa. He held it above his face, forcibly opening his eyes to see who was calling.
The name on the screen made him straighten up instantly.
Dalethy.
He picked up the call immediately, sitting fully upright. "What?" His voice was sharp, entirely alert, the drowsy irritation wiped clean in an instant.
On the other end, Dalethy’s voice came through tight, high, and unmistakably panicked. Her breathing was audible and rapid, the composed, sharp efficiency she normally carried entirely gone.
"Young master, did you see the news?!" she said, her words tumbling out fast and clipped.
Cruxius’s brow furrowed. "What? What happened?"
The sheer, naked panic in her voice was deeply unusual. Dalethy did not panic. Dalethy was a machine of composure under any conceivable pressure. The fact that she sounded like this sent an immediate, cold spike of sharp alertness straight down his spine.
"She’s panicking," he told himself flatly, his voice snapping into its full, commanding register. "Wait. Let me see."
He immediately pulled the phone away from his ear, switching it to speaker as his fingers moved quickly across the screen, pulling up the first available news feed.
The page loaded instantly, the headline snapping into sharp focus across his screen with the blunt, merciless impact of a physical blow.
//BREAKING: The Heir of Blac Corporation, Cruxius Blac, Has Vanished from Official Enthronement Ceremony — New Heir Announced as Thalia Blac.//
Beneath the headline, a high-resolution photograph showed Thalia standing at a gleaming, gold-edged podium in the grand Blac Corporation boardroom, dressed in an immaculate white power suit, her expression composed, victorious, and entirely, infuriatingly self-satisfied.
Cruxius stared at the screen.
The entire hallway was perfectly, deathly silent around him except for Dalethy’s rapid, anxious breathing still coming through the speaker.
His massive, naked frame was entirely still. His crimson-gold eyes read the headline one more time, slowly, carefully, as if giving his own brain a genuine, final opportunity to offer him an alternative interpretation of what was so plainly, so brazenly printed there.
It did not.
The vein along the side of his thick neck pulsed once, visibly.
His mouth twitched—a small, deeply involuntary tic at the very corner of his lip, the singular, external evidence of an enormous, volcanic internal reaction being held under an iron, vice-tight leash.
"T-the fuck?" he said.