She Used Me for a Dare… Now I Own Her Mother

”Who the hell are you?” Cole rasped, every muscle in his battered frame wound tight as a loaded spring. A deadly, paranoid chill seized his eyes. ”Are you with the Blackwoods? Did they send you?”

It was the only logical explanation his mind could reach. Only a family with roots stretching into the city’s deepest shadows could have peeled back his disguise so thoroughly.

Alex merely let out a quiet, amused chuckle.

”Relax, Raymond. I’m neither a Blackwood nor their dog. Just a man who can solve your problems without breaking a sweat.”

Alex took half a step forward, closing the distance between them. The suffocating weight of Cole’s aura rolled off his shoulders as if it were nothing more than a passing breeze.

”I know their names, their motives and where every last one of them sleeps at night,”

Alex said, his voice smooth and steady in the dark. ”Accept my terms, Raymond, and I’ll hand you your revenge on a silver platter.”

Silence crashed over the terrace. The words hung in Cole’s head, echoing like iron bells.

For a brief, reckless second, Cole’s instincts screamed at him to accept. Every drop of blood in his veins, every ounce of grief he had buried over five agonizing years, wanted nothing more than to say yes. He had swallowed dirt, let low-level thugs beat him on balconies, and lived like a dying dog just for a single lead. If this kid actually held those names, Cole would have traded his firm, his land, and his own blood without a second thought.

Cole closed his eyes and drew in a long, deliberate breath through his nose. The chaotic vital essence bleeding into the terrace began to pull back, coiling tightly inside his meridians until the air grew calm again. The wild, bloodshot fury in his eyes receded, replaced by a cold, calculating stillness.

He hadn’t survived four decades in this city by jumping at miracles.

When he opened his eyes, he looked at Alex not with blind hope, but with the sharp scrutiny of a seasoned predator.

A young man barely in his twenties, with no great family crest pinned to his chest and no known backing in the upper circles of the city. Yet here he was, standing inches from an Ascended cultivator, completely unfazed by a suffocating aura, claiming to possess secrets that even top-tier intelligence networks couldn’t touch.

It didn’t add up.

In this city, anyone handing out miracles was usually concealing a knife. Cole had spent forty years learning that poison tasted sweetest when you were starving, and desperation had buried far better men than him.

No matter how badly he wanted those names... no matter how deeply the urge for vengeance clawed at his chest... he couldn’t afford to swallow the bait blindly.

He needed to see the trap before he stepped into it.

Cole reached into his jacket, pulled out another cigarette, and struck a match with a steady hand. The flame flickered against his weathered face, casting sharp shadows across his bruised jaw before he blew it out.

He exhaled a slow plume of smoke into the cold night wind, his eyes narrowing into guarded slits.

”You caught me dead to rights, Alexander,” Cole said, his voice quiet, raw, and brutally honest. ”My cultivation, the drunken act, the blood debt I buried under five years of dirt... you saw straight through all of it. And God knows a desperate part of me wants nothing more than to believe you truly hold every answer I’ve been bleeding for.”

He paused, letting the wind carry away the gray smoke before fixing his gaze back on Alex.

”But here’s the reality: I don’t know a damn thing about you. I’ve never heard your name in the circles that matter. I don’t know where you came from, what you’re building, or who is pulling your strings. Pledging my life and my fists to an unknown stranger off the back of a verbal promise? That’s not a gamble a man who’s survived this long takes on a whim.”

Alex listened without a trace of irritation. Instead, the faint smile on his lips widened just a fraction... relaxed, patient, and utterly unfazed by the veteran’s skepticism.

”Some deals are worth selling your soul for, Raymond,” Alex said smoothly, his voice carrying the quiet ease of someone discussing the weather. ”Especially when the alternative is bleeding out in an alley with your debt unpaid and your son’s grave left cold.”

He tilted his head slightly, the distant sea of neon lights reflecting in the calm, unreadable depths of his eyes.

”And as for not knowing who I am... don’t trouble yourself over that. Very soon, you won’t be able to turn a corner in this city without hearing my name.”

It wasn’t spoken like a boast, nor did it carry the loud, fragile arrogance of an heir trying to sound important. It came out with the simple, chilling certainty of an undeniable fact.

Cole searched the young man’s face, trying to find a single crack in that armor, but there was only that bottomless stillness. The sheer audacity of the kid was maddening, yet the hardened cultivator in Cole knew better than to dismiss it as empty air.

”You’ve got a terrifying tongue on you, kid,” Cole murmured, the gravel in his voice firm and unyielding. ”Maybe you really are the monster you claim to be. Maybe you’re just the slickest devil this city ever produced. But I didn’t survive five years in the dirt by gambling everything on a five-minute conversation in the dark.”

He tossed the dying cigarette to the floor and crushed the ember beneath the heavy sole of his boot.

”If this offer is as solid as you say, it won’t rot by tomorrow. Give me three days. Let me think it through.”

Alex didn’t argue. Instead, he turned at an unhurried pace and walked back toward the stone balustrade. The leather folder still rested against the cold masonry, catching the faint glare of the neon skyline below. Alex reached out, lifted the heavy folder, and casually brushed off a stray smudge of terrace grit with the back of his fingers.

He tucked it smoothly beneath his arm, claiming it without an ounce of hesitation.

”Three days won’t be enough for a cautious man like you to convince himself,” Alex said, his tone effortless and calm. ”Take seven. I’ll come back in one week.”

He turned back toward the weathered veteran, offering a brief, faintly amused tilt of his head.

”Use that time well, Raymond. Try digging into me. Call whatever old contacts you have left in the shadows. See if you can find a single flaw in what I told you tonight.”

Alex didn’t wait around for an answer. With his hands slipping back into his coat pockets, he turned toward the terrace doors and walked away, his steps quiet and steady against the flagstones.

***

Cole remained rooted to the terrace floor, staring at the empty doorway. The night wind whipped across the railing, biting cold against his bruised face and torn shirt, but he hardly noticed it.

Seven days.

A chaotic storm of emotions churned in the old man’s chest.

His mind flashed back to his meeting barely an hour ago with the woman from the Silver Veil.

Her syndicate was feared across the entire continent, notorious for having ears in every shadow and eyes at every high table.

Cole had emptied half a private vault and waited months for an answer, only for her to shake her head. The trail had been scrubbed clean. Even an underworld giant like the Silver Veil couldn’t unearth a single thread.

In that crushing silence, Cole had felt the last ember of hope inside him die. For five agonizing years, hatred had kept his heart beating.

But walking out of that meeting, the suffocating reality had finally settled in... he would never find the people who poisoned his son. He would never learn where they dragged his daughter-in-law. He was going to rot in the gutter with his vengeance unfulfilled.

Except, right before she melted back into the shadows of the ballroom, the woman had slipped a single photograph into his palm.

”The trail was buried by hands too powerful for our network to cross,” she had said in that calm, detached voice of hers. ”If there is anyone in this city outside the Sacred Families capable of giving you those answers... it’s him.”

The picture had been of Alexander.

Cole had scoffed at the time, tossing the photograph aside with bitter disgust. He had assumed the great Silver Veil was simply peddling cheap smoke to mask their own syndicate’s incompetence.

And then, before the bitter sting of that disappointment had even settled, that very boy had stepped out onto his terrace.

A kid barely in his twenties, hands casually buried in his pockets, claiming he held the exact secrets an entire continental network couldn’t touch.

At first, it had sounded like a sick, pathetic joke.

Now, standing alone under the cold sky, Cole still had no idea who Alexander really was.

Was he an agent sent by the very monsters who butchered his family? A front for some hidden powerhouse? Or just another clever leech looking to use a broken father’s desperation for his own gain?

Cole didn’t know. And frankly, he didn’t care.

He hadn’t asked for time because he was hesitating. It was a cold, deliberate gamble.

The moment Alex picked up that leather folder, he painted a massive target on his own chest.

The three families had been circling Cole’s property like starving wolves for months, ready to tear apart anyone who dared snatch the meat from their jaws.

If Alex was just an arrogant kid with a silver tongue, the three families would crush him to dust before the week was out. He would bleed in the street, and Cole would lose nothing.

”Survive the onslaught, Alexander,” Cole muttered into the freezing dark, his scarred jaw setting like iron.

If the young man could withstand the combined wrath of three prominent clans and still stand on this terrace seven days from now, then his claims weren’t empty words.

And if that proved to be true, Cole would gladly hand him his soul.