"AGHH—!"
He cried and writhed beneath her grip, limbs flailing in a frantic display of uselessness; a man reduced to a pathetic heap of bones and cowardice with nothing left to fight with.
She didn't blink as her dark red nails, sharp and meticulously manicured, dug into the fragile flesh of his neck. With a calculated twist of her wrist, she forced him to his knees. One hand. That was all it took to bring him down. A single, elegant hand wielding the force 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 smooth but razor-edged, charged with the stillness that arrives just before a storm breaks everything apart.
He whimpered. Adorable.
A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, trailing shame in its path. His once-dominant eyes were now wide and pleading, searching hers for mercy.
She had none.
She never had any mercy for men like him.
"Do you want to know what your biggest mistake was?" Her eyes 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 closer until her lips grazed his skin, her breath warm and wicked against his cheek. Her proximity wasn't comfort. It was pure torture.
"The day you opened that ugly little mouth of yours and polluted the air with your mediocrity," she snarled. "The day you decided that a woman wasn't built for power. That we're too soft, too delicate, and too emotional to sit at the head of the table. That we don't belong at the top." Her jaw locked as fury climbed, flooding her veins with heat. "How dare you try to reduce me to anything less than a goddamn queen?"
Danica tightened her grip around his neck, forcing a choke from him.
"You stood there, puffed up with entitlement, and had the audacity to question what I was capable of?" Her voice grew colder. "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 drop like discarded surgical gloves after a failed procedure.
Danica squared her shoulders, not a single strand of her obsidian-black hair out of place. She appeared untouched by violence, unfazed by rage, as if she could drift from a magazine cover straight into a battlefield and never miss a step.
"Die slowly, bastard." She muttered under her breath, staring at his unconscious body lying sprawled on the floor. Those red fingerprints branded into his throat? They were satisfying.
Danica Clarke. The name whispered behind boardroom doors and shouted in headlines that tried, and failed, to capture her adroitness. Feared and revered in equal measure. She was part enigma, part storm, a deliberate blend of brilliance and lethality that quieted rooms and dismantled careers.
At twenty-five, while the world around her drowned in bottomless brunches and late-night regrets, Danica built Dominion from the ground up. A product-based global empire that now bent markets to her will.
She turned and walked out of the room. The sharp rhythm of her heels sent the warning of her arrival to the man who'd been waiting outside. Her manager. Paul Williams.
"Boss," he bowed and immediately straightened up as she approached closer. "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 one where your voice was background noise, your thoughts irrelevant, and your job simple: clean the mess. The mess, more often than not, was drenched in blood and bruised egos.
The moment he stepped into the room and absorbed the aftermath, it registered like a Monday morning coffee: unpleasant, predictable, and unavoidable.
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 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 an ugly part of him hoped, yes.