Before breakfast Phei had pulled Eira aside into the empty living room and given her the order plainly.

"I want you to train me. Properly without holding back."

Eira’s small face had responded with something Phei would later replay in memory with deep, sinking suspicion: she had smiled.

Not a warm, proud-familiar smile at her master’s maturation.

A slow, wide, appreciative smile with patient teeth.

"Finally, master," she’d said, "I have been waiting for you to ask me that, and you are going to regret ever opening your pretty mouth on this subject, and I am going to enjoy every delicious second of your suffering."

He would, later, come to understand that asking Eira to train him had been, in retrospect, less a prudent strategic decision and more like politely asking the devil for a piggyback ride straight through hell and back — except hell, at least, had the decency to end.

Eira’s training, he would come to suspect, was going to be far more creative, far more personal, and infinitely more entertaining for everyone except him.

But whatever fresh circle of hell was coming —

He had made up his mind.

He would train.

He was reaching for a second cup of coffee when the Hall’s conversation did not exactly stop but adjusted.

Every head turned in the hall turned, even his women and entire table, one after another, like dominoes in a very expensive game.

A figure stood had stood up making his presence known and looking directly at Phei’s table.

Tall. Immaculately dressed, pale hair so white-blond it passed for silver in the Hall’s morning light, swept back from a forehead so architecturally flawless it looked personally sculpted by arrogant angels who had been paid in stock options.

A three-piece suit in slate grey, cut specifically to a frame built along the old Heavenchild lines — broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist, the tailoring a quiet, arrogant advertisement of inherited bone structure that screamed old money, older power, and zero intention of asking permission for anything, ever.

Marcus Heavenchild.

And he was walking through the Empyrean Dining Hall from his table to Phei’s that was full like of his women, and everyone he cared about.

Uninvited and unannounced but Marcus didn’t care as he crossed the white marble at a measured unhurried stride like he was walking the halls of something he owned, whether the hotel, the room, or the entire damn morning.

Prince of Earth entitlement.

"Phei." Marcus’s voice was pleasant and unhurried but pitched just loud enough to carry the length of the table, to brush against the marble walls and come back softened and public for everyone in the hall to hear. "Tell me. The penthouse. The dining hall reservation. The staff. Whose card are we on today? Melissa’s? Your dead parent’s inheritance you just claimed?"

Phei’s eyes grew dark that very instant.

Marcus let the silence work for a beat, the way only someone born with a trust fund and a god complex could.

"I only ask because a man of your — family background — ordinarily finds a threshold like the Empyrean difficult to cross without an adult’s signature."

The table went very still.

Delilah looked down at her plate with the careful stillness like she had just remembered she was only here for the pancakes and not the impending bloodbath.

Phei did not answer.

He was still holding his coffee.

He had not even raised his eyes from its surface.

The sovereign stillness of it — the refusal to acknowledge — was not a retreat.

It was a choice. A boy three years ago would have coloured, would have stammered, would have made the mistake of attempting a rebuttal.

This Phei drank his coffee like a man who had already won the war and was simply waiting for the enemy to finish his monologue.

But Elena did not have his patience for bullshiters like Marcus.

Elena had been watching Marcus since the instant he walked from his table of his family, her eyes had tracked his approach like a sniper scoping a target. Her hand had tightened faintly around her butter knife.

Elena’s chin came up and she said, very clearly, into the quiet —

"Marcus. You look tired. Are they letting you out to walk alone and talk to people without supervision now, or did you sneak out to play big boy at a table you weren’t invited to?"

A sound escaped Maddie. A small involuntary snort that she smothered into her coffee, the kind of sound that said oh Marcus, you just walked into the lion’s den wearing steak cologne.

Marcus’s pale eyes slid sideways to Elena.

And something ugly — small and ugly and pedigreed — surfaced in them, the kind of expression old money wore when someone reminded it that money could buy everything except class and brains.

"Elena."

His voice was still pleasant.

"I confess I’m a little surprised to see you here, sweetheart. I really am. I had expected more of you, given your family’s standards." His gaze flicked to Madam Ashford, brief and acidic, and then back. "Sitting at this table. At his table. In this — arrangement. I’d have thought the Ashford bloodline taught its daughters to read a room better than this."

He turned slowly.

While his voice deliberately climbed — not louder, exactly, but broader, projected outward to catch every staff member standing at the sideboard and every pair eyes and ears in the Empyrean Dining Hall, the cello audio notwithstanding, because nothing said old money tantrum like making sure the everyone heard him.

"Look at this table, Elena. Really look at it. Your mother is sitting two seats down from a boy whose aunt—" his finger did not lift but his gaze landed, surgical, on Melissa "— has spent the last six weeks warming his bed... orchestrating him to go beat her husband Harold Maxton and later divorce, just so they could be in their taboo illicit relationship.

"His very aunt, Elena. Blood aunt. Raised him from a child. The incest is not subtext, it is the arrangement. And she sits there," his eyes flicked to Melissa with cold patrician mockery, "pouring herself a second cappuccino like she hasn’t been rearranging herself on her nephew’s cock even before he’s even legally old enough to be appropriate. He’s fucking seventeen... I am the only one seeing how messed up that is? It’s a fucking crime!"

Melissa did not move or blink.

Her cappuccino stayed precisely at her lips, her eyes over its rim, her expression composed into the still inscrutable arrangement Phei had seen her wear in boardrooms. The insult passed through her without registering on the surface of her face.

But Phei, beside her, felt the minute pressure of her knee against his under the table.

"And his cousin," Marcus continued, conversationally, because he was not finished — he was nowhere near finished — "Delilah Maxton. Eighteen years old, they grew up in the same house, Elena. Grew up across the hallway. He has been working his way through her as well, hasn’t he?

"Of course he has. Why stop at the aunt when the cousin is right there? And they call it taboo. They call it forbidden fruit. But strip the language, and what you are sitting next to is a family that fucks itself. That is what this is. A boy who turned on his benefactors and decided the appropriate repayment was to bed every woman under his uncle’s roof one at a time."

David’s mouth had fallen open.

Landon’s knuckles on the table had gone white.

Maddie’s humour had curdled into something harder. Her foot had gone completely still against Phei’s calf.

Her bare shoulders had squared like she was two seconds from launching herself across the table with a butter knife and a smile.

Sierra’s face had achieved the absolute motionless clarity of a frozen lake the moment before it cracks.

"And the Montgomery heiress," Marcus added, because a cruelty he had begun he intended to finish, his pale gaze finding Sierra unerringly, "sitting right there. Jonathan’s daughter. Jonathan’s daughter, Elena. Very soon it would be mother and daughter. Not in series. In parallel."

Sierra’s hand closed on her knife.

Melissa’s hand, under the table, settled quietly over Sierra’s wrist.

"And there goes the Whitmore heiress too," Marcus said, turning at last to Maddie, "who I’m told volunteered herself into this situation without any form of coercion at all. The chaos Whitmore. Mm. Well. Chaos finds its own level, I suppose."

He spread his hands. Almost gracious. Almost regretful.

"I have been, frankly, fascinated by the audacity of it. The sheer audacity of a boy with nothing — nothing, less than nothing, a literal charity case pulled up out of a Maxton laundry room — installing himself at the top of a tower in this city and holding court over every female relative he could reach and whatever women happened to wander into reach afterward.

"It is — genuinely — a spectacle. I tip my hat to it. I do. But let us not pretend, at this table, that what we are looking at is anything other than what it is."

His pale eyes returned, at last, to Phei.

Held.

"An incest orgy served on good china."

Silence.

Silence that had weight.

[Ding! New Mission!]