Chapter 39 - The Shattered Throne
The panic inside the banquet hall reached a fever pitch. Board members began frantically dialing their brokers, screaming orders into their phones, while others hastily gathered their belongings and hurried toward the emergency exits, desperate to distance themselves from the radioactive ruin of Alistair Sterling.
Sterling stood completely paralyzed behind his chair, his silver hair disheveled, the aristocratic illusion that had shielded him for decades stripped away to reveal a desperate, cornered rat.
"You think you've won, Kane?" Sterling hissed, his voice trembling with manic desperation as his hand slipped beneath his tailored coat. "You think you can just walk in here with a bastard boy and take the empire I spent twenty years building?!"
Before Sterling could draw the snub-nosed revolver concealed in his inner pocket, Sylvester moved with blinding speed that defied his shoulder injury.
With a single fluid strike of his right arm, Sylvester seized Sterling by the throat and lifted the grown man completely off the floor, slamming him backward against the reinforced glass window of the skyscraper. The glass groaned under the impact, spiderweb cracks spreading behind Sterling’s head forty floors above the city lights.
"Don't flatter yourself, Alistair," Sylvester growled, his face inches from the choking oligarch's. "I didn't come here to win a business transaction. I came to show you what happens to anyone who dares point a weapon at my family."
"S-Sylvester..." Sterling choked out, his heels drumming helplessly against the wall as oxygen left his lungs. "You... you don't know... what you've... unleashed..."
Lucas stepped forward, his small hands resting gently against Sylvester’s hip. "Sylvester," Lucas said softly, his voice cutting through the bloodlust that clouded the giant's eyes. "Don't kill him. He's not worth going to prison for. Let him watch us take everything."
Sylvester’s chest rose and fell in ragged breaths. He looked down at the boy, then back at the suffocating banker.
Slowly, deliberately, Sylvester lowered his arm, dropping Sterling like a sack of stones onto the marble floor. Sterling crumpled, coughing violently and clutching his bruised throat.
"Federal marshals are in the lobby," Sylvester said coldly, turning his back on the broken man. "You will spend the rest of your pathetic life in a federal penitentiary, watching this boy rebuild what your greed destroyed."
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Sylvester extended his uninjured arm, wrapping it securely around my waist and pulling Lucas close to his side. "Let's go home."
***
