Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 490

Chapter 490: Through the Night

The television murmured like a drunk uncle at a wedding, spilling canned laughter into the dark while its blue glow painted the walls in sickly pulses. I wasn’t watching. Couldn’t. The screen may as well have been a fish tank full of plastic clowns. My skull was the real circus, and the ringmaster was a pair of women who’d slipped past every barbed-wire fence I’d ever built around myself.

Mia. Mom.

One wore sin like couture; the other wore exhaustion like a second skin. Both were wrecking me from the inside out.

Mia—Tommy’s girl, the forbidden fruit dangling so low it bruised my knuckles every time I reached.

Tonight she’d floated down those stairs in lace pants so sheer they were basically a rumor. Moonlight through gauze. The sway of her hips had been a metronome counting down to damnation. That black top? A couple of rebellious ribbons playing hide-and-seek with gravity. Every strip of bare skin felt like a dare scribbled in neon across my retinas.

One breath, one accidental brush of her fingers on my shoulder, and the Lust Presence had roared up my spine like molten mercury, whispering: Take. Ruin. Keep.

Then there was Mom. The thought alone felt like swallowing broken glass. Complicated didn’t begin to cover it. Complicated was a Sunday crossword. This was a goddamn labyrinth with no exit and mirrors on every wall.

My cock jerked against my zipper like it had its own heartbeat and a vendetta. I shifted, hissed, adjusted—useless. Meridian had been a battlefield today. Dominique folded in half until her legs forgot their purpose.

Catherine’s office still probably smelled like sex and shredded dignity.

Yet here I was, vibrating like a tuning fork dipped in gasoline, ready to burn the whole night down for one more hit.

I thought about Catherine—Christ, Catherine—limping through tomorrow’s board meeting with my fingerprints bruised into her thighs and zero clue I was balls-deep in her niece’s heart.

Thirty-three grand in SP for that particular family forbidden love. Total sitting pretty at three-hundred-seventy large. Thirty-seven million in cold hard cash if I ever felt poor again.

Funny how numbers lose flavor once you can buy islands on a whim. Back when I was Peter Carter—skinny knees, empty pockets, Mom’s disappointed sigh echoing off cracked linoleum—those zeroes would’ve tasted like heaven.

Now they were just confetti in a hurricane.

Sweat trickled down my temple. Heart slugging against ribs like it wanted out. Jaw locked so tight I could’ve ground diamonds. The Lust Presence coiled under my skin, a dragon pacing its cage, tail lashing, smoke curling from its nostrils.

"ARIA," I rasped, voice raw as torn velvet. "Mom’s ETA?"

"Shift ends in forty-eight minutes, boss. Seventy until she’s wheels-down in the driveway. She’ll do her usual victory lap—check Mr. Patel’s morphine, steal one last candy from the nurses’ station. You know the ritual."

Seventy minutes.

An eternity measured in heartbeats and bad decisions.

Seventy minutes to sit here with my dragon and my demons and the ghost of Mia’s lace swaying like a pendulum between salvation and hell.

I dragged both hands through my hair, pulled until my scalp screamed. The pain was clean. Anchoring.

I stood abruptly, unable to sit still anymore.

The house settled around me as I moved to my bedroom—I grabbed my leather jacket from the hall closet—Italian leather, custom fitted, soft as butter and smelling like money and bergamot from the cologne I’d worn earlier.

The weight of it settled over my shoulders, familiar, comforting in a way I didn’t question. Then I reached for the spare one— will be for Mom.

Outside, the cool air hit different. Not cold—LA didn’t do cold, not really—but less oppressively hot.

The gate recognized my biometrics and opened silently as I approached—facial recognition, thermal imaging, probably three other security measures ARIA had implemented that I’d never asked about. It swung inward smooth and silent, expensive engineering making tons of metal move like it weighed nothing.

I walked through, and the cool LA night wrapped around me completely. The temperature drop was subtle but noticeable—maybe five degrees cooler outside the property, that microclimate difference money could buy.

The mansion across ours loomed—some tech executive’s place, all glass and steel and aggressive architecture, lights off, probably empty half the year while they traveled to Aspen or Dubai or wherever rich people went to pretend they weren’t home.

I paid it zero attention.

I could’ve driven to my estate. The Phantom was right there. Ten minutes of leather and silence and that V12 engine that sounded like money being incinerated, and I’d be at headquarters where my empire operated, where my women waited, where I could lose myself in pleasure until sunrise.

Madison would probably already be there, or she’d come if I called. Sofia would answer on the first ring. Isabella would make an excuse to her husband and drive over. Any of them would welcome me with open arms and legs and mouths and everything else I needed.

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