10x God-Tier Stealing System: Pumping S-Rank SuperHeroines Daily!-Chapter 31- Handling Step-Sister

’WHY.’

The word detonated somewhere inside Jenny’s chest with no warning and no exit.

’WHY.’

She’d planned this. Carefully. Every detail, every contact, every favor called in. Jake had sourced the drug. She had arranged the occasion. She had chosen the target—her stepsister, that ungrateful black-haired bitch who always ended up with more than she deserved, just by existing in rooms that should’ve been Jenny’s.

She’d wanted Thalia broken. Ruined. The kind of ruined that didn’t wash off.

Instead—

’Instead.’

The fleet was still pulling into the driveway. The Rolls-Royces, the Range Rovers, the bodyguards whose suits cost more than Jenny’s car, the quiet command of men who didn’t need to announce their authority because they simply had it. And stepping out of the lead car, with a dress that hugged her curves and sunglasses she wore like armor and her chin at that infuriating angle—

Thalia.

’Her’ Thalia. The same girl who’d lived in their house like a charity case. Who’d eaten their food and used their electricity and had the ’nerve’ to slap Jenny’s mother before walking out with her bags. Who was supposed to be broken by now. Who was supposed to be crawling.

Instead she was here.

Looking like ’that.’

Arm’s reach from one of the most powerful men in Northeast Europe, looking like she’d always belonged in exactly this kind of light.

"Th-Thalia?"

Jenny heard her own voice escape before she’d chosen to use it. Too small. Too stunned. Jake was beside her but she’d forgotten him entirely, sunglasses not doing enough to hide the way her face was doing things she couldn’t control.

Across the driveway—Thalia stopped.

Her head turned.

Their eyes met.

And then—Thalia ’moved.’

Not walking. Not approaching with caution. Moving the way she moved when she was a black belt and the room stopped mattering—two bounds, both feet fully committed, trajectory absolute.

"’Wait—’"

SLAP.

The sound cracked across the driveway like a gunshot.

Jenny’s head snapped sideways, sunglasses knocked askew, hand flying to her cheek. She stumbled half a step. Jake froze beside her. The nurses near the entrance entrance went completely still. Phones, already raised for the fleet, now tracked this instead—because the woman who’d stepped out of a Blac Corporation car had just walked twenty feet across hospital property and slapped someone’s face clean off their personality.

The silence afterward was the kind that held its breath.

"How could you fall ’so low,’" Thalia said.

Her voice was shaking—not from weakness. From the effort of containing something enormous and keeping it under twelve words. Her chest rose and fell with it. Her hand still tingled from the impact. She stood three feet from Jenny and didn’t move back.

Jenny’s mouth opened.

Her eyes went from the handprint forming on her cheek to Thalia’s face to the fleet behind her—and something flickered through them that might, on another day, have been called fear.

"Y-you—" She tried to pull the performance back together. "’You’—"

"’Tch.’" Jake moved.

He stepped forward, jaw clenched, and grabbed Thalia’s wrist mid-air before she could wind up a second time. His grip was tight, intention clear—the kind of grab that planned to shove next.

"’Stop him.’"

The voice was even. Not raised. Just—placed into the air with the finality of a door shutting.

Cruxius stood beside the Rolls-Royce with his hands in his pockets, weight distributed easy, watching. He’d processed it in the ten seconds since stepping out of the car. Woman slaps woman the moment she sees her face—not rage at a stranger, rage at a history. That’s the stepsister. The man reacting is too close, too defensive—fiancé. The one currently turning toward the fleet with the specific horror of a man who just identified the corporate symbol on the vehicles belongs to someone with administrative power here.

Two and two.

He hadn’t moved yet. He had just spoken.

"’And break his wrist.’"

Jake turned—

A hand caught his.

He hadn’t seen Darithi move. She was simply there, fingers closed around his wrist with a grip that did not negotiate. He tried to pull. She didn’t allow it. He blinked at her—short hair, black suit, sharp eyes that looked right through him the way a wall looks through weather.

"Who the—’ARGHH’—"

’crnch.’

The sound was specific and terrible. Not dramatic. Just structural—the sound of something load-bearing giving way.

Jake dropped to his knees. His mouth was open before the scream arrived, face going white, then red, clutching his wrist with his other hand. The sound that came out of him wasn’t words.

’thud.’

The driveway absorbed him.

The crowd that had been murmuring went absolutely silent.

Seleyena, who had been standing near the hospital entrance with her hands in her coat pockets, watching this unfold with the focused attention of someone building a case, watched Jake collapse and felt something cold shift behind her eyes.

She had seen the footage. She had heard the names. She had done the math on what Cruxius Blac had done to a girl named Thalia after being handed her by the exact two people currently standing on this driveway.

She had been watching the victim step out of that man’s car.

Now she watched the victimizer’s fiancé get his wrist broken in a hospital parking lot by a woman in a black suit.

The universe had a crude sense of proportion.

"’Jake!’" The dean’s voice cut through the crowd before he’d even reached them—"What is the ’meaning’ of this?!"

Dean Alvian arrived at a pace that indicated he’d broken into something close to a run the moment he’d seen his son go down. Face flushed. Senior physicians flanking him, both trying to look neutral while clearly being neither. He reached Jake’s side, eyes skipping from his son to Darithi to the fleet to the man standing calmly beside the Rolls-Royce with his hands still in his pockets.

"’Before we get too far into introductions,’" the calm man said.

Alvian looked at him properly.

A beat.

Something in the man’s posture—the ease of it, the complete absence of urgency—stalled whatever Alvian had been building toward.

"’Cruxius Blac.’"

One of the subsidiary CEOs had already rushed forward, slightly out of breath, glasses slightly crooked—"Mr. Alvian, he’s the young master of—"

"I’m here about last night," Cruxius said, overriding the introduction without raising his voice. His gaze had moved—past Alvian, past Jake on the ground, past Jenny still standing with her hand to her cheek. It had landed on Seleyena.

Specifically.

Who was standing exactly where she’d been standing, hands in her coat, watching him with eyes that were doing rapid and precise assessment behind thin-rimmed glasses.

Her expression wasn’t the one he normally got when people heard his name. Not the awe, not the immediate performance of deference. It was—cooler. Skeptical. Like a person who’d already formed a working theory and was updating it in real time.

She knew something.

He’d expected that. What he hadn’t expected was the specific quality of her expression—not just skepticism but ’disapproval.’ Not of him arriving. Of what she thought he’d ’done.’

So she’d heard enough to form a verdict but maybe not enough for the full picture.

Good.

"Your son," Cruxius continued, gaze returning to Alvian with the calm of a man holding all his cards face-down, "spiked the drink of that young woman last night." He didn’t gesture toward Thalia. He didn’t need to—everyone’s eyes were already on her. "I’ll clarify also that the drug was an aphrodisiac. And it was in my drink as well."