Chapter 160: The Perfect Weapon
The glass doors of the Dwentreen Hotel’s exclusive rooftop lounge shut out the muted roar of Freenly City, burying the two occupants in a suffocating, pressurized silence. Nestled within the upper tier of the western sector, the lounge was virtually deserted.
Damian Boren sat stiffly in a low leather armchair, wearing his immaculate white suit. His golden eyes, bearing the unmistakable, lethal intensity of the Boren bloodline, were fixed on the small crystal tumbler of ice water between his hands. Across the low table, Joanne Moscow looked like a vision of venomous ruin. The dress she had worn during her humiliation at the Grefo estate was gone, replaced by a sharp, tailored black suit, but her manicured fingers still trembled slightly with an erratic, consuming rage.
"My father is moving ahead with the plan, Joanne," Damian said, his voice flat, stripped of its usual calm. He didn’t look up, his knuckles turning stark white against the glass. "He’s finalized the metrics. He is planning on kidnapping Jannah. And I am completely against it."
Joanne let out a sharp, mocking laugh that cut through the quiet lounge like a serrated blade. She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing into lethal slits. "You’re against it? Are you losing your mind, Damian? Your father is offering you the crown jewels on a silver platter, and you’re sitting here whining about his methods?"
"I don’t like the way he uses his means," Damian hissed, his jaw locking tight as he finally raised his eyes to meet hers, the golden irises flaring with a dangerous energy. "He wants to treat her like a piece of biological meat to be harvested. I have spent four years down in those slums protecting her from the street gangs, building a charity clinic just to be near her, keeping her safe from the Alphas who tried to claim her. I wanted to court her properly. I wanted her to come to me willingly now that her system is fully developed. Kidnapping her... forcing her into my place... it will destroy her fragile system."
"Oh, stop being such an overly nice person!" Joanne snapped, her voice rising in sudden, volatile frustration as she slammed her palm flat against the table. The sound echoed sharply off the high ceilings. "Look at yourself! You are a Boren Alpha, yet you’re acting like a pathetic, hesitant physician of the gutters! You should at least fight for the girl you love! If you keep playing the fair, righteous gentleman, Dorrent Grefo is going to bend her to his will permanently!"
She stood up abruptly, her heels clicking aggressively against the floor as she began to pace the narrow space between the chairs, her chest heaving with bitter fury.
"I won’t stop at nothing, Damian. Do you hear me? Nothing." Joanne’s face twisted into a mask of humiliation as she remembered the absolute betrayal she had suffered just days prior. "The Grefos think they’ve won. They think they can just casually throw me away like a piece of used corporate trash. Dorrent wasted three long years of my youth! Three years of me being his perfect, loyal, high-society fiancée, dedicating my entire life to his name! And for what? For him to annul the engagement in front of my parents? For him to stand there with that flat, freezing voice and tell my mother that his heart doesn’t beat for me?!"
She stopped pacing, her fingers curling into tight, claw-like fists at her sides as she stared out the windows at the sprawling neon grid of Freenly City. "He is not lucky. I will ensure he is profoundly unfortunate. I will never let them live happily. I am going to tear Jannah and Dorrent apart piece by piece, until there is nothing left of their world but ash!"
Damian leaned back against the headrest, his expression hardening into a grim mask. "You’re letting your rage blind you to the biological reality, Joanne. The Grefos didn’t just break the contract on a whim. My father and I have analyzed the historical data."
"Of course they didn’t!" Joanne spun around, her eyes swamped with a sudden, venomous realization. "It all makes sense now. The pieces of the game finally fit together. The Grefos must have figured out the secret of her biology. They figured out that Jannah Nenth can give birth to an Enigma, even an S-tier tycoon like Dorrent! That is exactly why they dumped me for that filthy housemaid! They don’t care about a multi-billion credit merger with Gammar Tech anymore; they want her womb! They want her to give them Enigma grandchildren to cement the Grefo name above the council forever!"
She marched back to the table, leaning over the expanse until her hot breath scorched the air between them, her gaze locking dead onto Damian’s face.
"Which is exactly why you need to hurry up and follow your father’s plan, Damian! Kidnap the girl! Snatch her from under Dorrent’s nose before he seals the territorial bond permanently! Let’s see where the Grefos will get those precious Enigma grandchildren they wish to have from when that girl is locked inside a Boren stronghold!"
Damian let out a short, cold laugh that sounded completely hollow, a chilling final-note vibration settling in his throat. He set his glass down with a slow precision.
"There’s something else, Joanne. Incase you didn’t know... Dorrent Grefo killed Jannah’s parents nine years ago."
Joanne froze, her breath catching sharply in her throat as her eyes widened to the size of saucers. "What?"
"Nine years ago, when Dorrent was just entering his full S-tier maturity, he experienced a catastrophic black cycle," Damian delivered flatly. "His primal energy core completely overrode his sanity. He went on a bloody frenzy in the lower sector, and Jannah’s parents were caught in the crossfire. They were slaughtered by his hands. And it seems Jannah has absolutely no idea about this reality. The Grefos buried the records so deep that not even the council could trace them. If she knew, she would never accept the Grefo arrangement. She would rather die than let him touch her body."
A slow, terrifying smirk began to touch Joanne’s beautiful lips, her expression shifting from raw fury into a dark, calculating malice. She tilted her head, her fingers smoothing down the lapel of her black suit.
"That... that is great leverage," she whispered, her voice laced with a sudden, intoxicating wickedness. "That is the perfect weapon, Damian. We can use that secret to drag her away from him permanently. We can make her hate him so deeply that his winter-frost pheromones will act as nothing more than a foreign biological attack on her system."
"It’s true," Damian agreed, his golden eyes flaring with resolute light as the legacy of the Boren bloodline began to boil to the surface of his skin. "According to the ancient data of her specific lineage, a first-born daughter cannot successfully conceive or get pregnant unless she truly loves the man. Her system completely rejects the seed under mental resistance. If we reveal the truth to her—if we show her the blood on Dorrent’s hands—she will never let him close to her again. Her spirit will fight him, the biological bond will fracture, and Dorrent will never be able to impregnate her with the Enigma child he desires."
Joanne’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the back of the leather chair, her mind rapidly calculating the timeline, the layout, and the absolute ruin of the Grefo lineage. The neon lights of Freenly City flickered across her face, casting a shadow over her elegant features.
She leaned in close, her eyes locking onto Damian’s with lethal urgency.
"Then we should start moving immediately, Damian. There is absolutely no time to waste before the Grefos manipulate her mind completely and she accidentally falls for Dorrent... we must strike now, because if that girl’s heart opens to him even a fraction, we lose the only window we have to burn his world to the ground."