His polished shoes scrabbling for purchase on the marble, his hands pressing behind him, his body scooting along the sideboard a few desperate inches at a time, the patrician composure that had dominated this Hall thirty seconds ago now a memory wearing his face poorly.

He moved like a trust-fund prince discovering the gutter has no valet parking — elbows and knees doing the work his dignity had abandoned.

Phei said, very quietly:

"Stop."

The single syllable landed like bullet and carrying the full seismic aftershock of the Dragon Aura still flooding the hall at city-block scale.

Marcus’s nervous system folded instantly, every muscle locking in terrified obedience and his whole body just seized.

For one full second his legs kicked weakly as his conscious mind fought the order. Then his conscious mind lost, and the kicking stopped, and he lay propped against the sideboard, motionless, staring up at Phei with ruined composure.

Phei reached him.

Crouched down.

Their faces were perhaps six inches apart.

Phei’s amethyst eyes. Marcus’s silver-grey ones, leaking water at the corners that were not tears in any dignified sense but the involuntary overflow of a body that had been told to stop producing dignity for the next minute.

Phei spoke.

Low enough that only Marcus heard.

"This isn’t the end, Marcus."

A beat.

"Trust me."

Another.

"I might not be able to today. But I am going to kill you one day."

"One day I’ll erase you so clean from the annuals of the universe. But today? Today you get to live with the footage. Consider it interest."

"That’s a promise."

He delivered the words with the cool finality, signing a contract of blood.

He held Marcus’s pale gaze for exactly as long as it took the words to land, and then — as though having delivered a package and not wishing to linger at the doorstep — Phei stood.

Turned and walked, unhurried, back toward his table.

He lifted one finger as he walked... a small two-degree gesture. Barely a signal at all.

The manager of the Empyrean Dining Hall had been standing near the far wall the entire time, who had not intervened at any point during Marcus’s monologue because — halfway through it — Melissa had caught his eye across the Hall and, with a single minute lift of her chin, instructed him not to.

He read Phei’s two-degree gesture and moved.

He crossed the marble floor to Marcus Heavenchild’s collapsed form. Bowed — a deep formal bow at the waist, held for a full two seconds — toward Phei’s receding back rather than toward the Main Legacy prince seated on his floor.

Then, softly, he signalled the staff.

Two members in crisp white approached. Lifted Marcus under the arms and began, with the practiced discretion of hospitality professionals who had removed intoxicated senators from finer rooms than this, to walk him out.

They made it perhaps three steps.

Then Marcus’s head lolled forward, his legs refused to carry their share, and his body slackened in their grip.

And the patch of marble where he had been sitting —

Revealed itself.

A spreading irregular dark stain on the polished stone. The three-piece slate grey trousers visibly wet along the inner seams. A thin amber rivulet still tracking down from his left shoe onto the marble as he was lifted, leaving a faint trail between the sideboard and the doors.

The smell reached the nearest tables half a heartbeat later.

A gasp went up.

One table, then another, Marcus’s father went a specific shade of grey. The twins beside him covered their mouths with identical manicured hands. The had already maid lowered her phone—

The patrons along the southern windows, the cluster near the lift, the peripheral tables, the staff at the sideboard, every audible pair of ears in the Empyrean Dining Hall registered what had just been revealed and permitted themselves, one by one, to begin —

Laughing.

By the time the Heavenchild prince had been dragged fully through the double-doors, the laughter had found its feet and was rolling in waves — the raw, ugly, beautiful sound of a city watching a king get publicly demoted to "that guy who pissed himself at brunch."

Viewers on the livestream were already clipping the moment, captions writing themselves in real time: "Prince of Earth meets Prince of Puddles — LIVE." Dark comedy at its finest and the marble didn’t even charge extra for the stain.

Phei returned to his seat and sat down.

Took up his coffee again which had cooled.

’There goes my coffee.’

He turned, and leaned sideways toward Melissa, and — quietly, privately, for her ears only — murmured, "I’m sorry. For the scene. I know you would have preferred a cleaner morning."

Melissa’s hand found his. "My love," she said mildly, "I knew precisely what I signed up for."

She turned her head a fraction.

"Ladies?"

Sierra, still visibly composed — inclined her chin once. "I did too."

Maddie, biting into the steak she had refused to abandon at any point during the proceedings, nodded while chewing. "Mm-hm."

Delilah, seated further down, did not look up from her plate but lifted her fork in acknowledgement.

Madam Ashford’s faint smile, her lips barely moving, was agreement enough.

Elena — her jade eyes shining, her hands gripping the edge of the table in white-knuckled aftershock, having just watched Marcus Heavenchild piss himself in public after the humiliating things he had said to her — said nothing.

But she did not lower her gaze. She looked, directly across the table at Phei.

Amber and Yuki exchanged a long fascinated glance. They had expected Marcus to die in a game of his own making eventually.

But still they had not expected this.

Patricia and Valentina, further down the table, were already laughing at David.

Because David — faithful to his calling, loyal to the lens — had moved during the final seconds of the extraction. Had followed the staff.

He had, in fact, crouched at a respectful distance and captured in high-definition 4K the specific ground-level shot of Marcus’s leaking trail on the marble and the spreading patch on his trousers as the staff carried him past.

He returned to the table now, camera in hand, grinning from ear to ear.

"Five hundred thousand," he announced.

Landon, recovering, pointed at Phei and Brian. "Told you. Told you. I said at the start of this trip — David is going to make more money from this vacation than the three of us combined. Didn’t I say that? Brian?"

Brian, his arm now back around Rhea, nodded solemnly.

Phei, a small amused smile playing at the edge of his mouth, extended a hand toward David.

"So where’s my cut. You just gave me content, no?"

David scoffed. "Fuck off. I helped you make sure five hundred thousand people watched you humiliate the Prince of Earth for the second time. You owe me. You should be paying me. You know the only way you could, not money."

Maddie, biting into a second piece of her steak, wiped her mouth with a linen napkin with theatrical care.

"Wait. Wait." She pointed her fork at David.

"Is this—" her fork circled lazily around the content-creator-empire-in-progress David was currently gesturing with, "—David’s way of asking Phei to help him get a girl? Because if it is, he should just say it. Just ask, David. You’ve made five hundred thousand dollars in ninety seconds. You can afford to be brave."

The table exploded in laughter.

David turned a specific colour.

Melissa, with the grace of a queen dispensing policy, pointed her fork with small deliberate precision at a waitress who had been serving them throughout the morning from the very start — a tall striking brunette in the Empyrean’s crisp white uniform, her hair braided, faint amused alertness in her eyes, nothing in the Hall having been missed.

"That one," Melissa said mildly.

The table turned.

The waitress, feeling the collective gaze land on her, looked up from the tray she was loading. Met Melissa’s and David’s eyes.

And smiled. Once. Small.

David’s cheeks achieved a red Phei had not previously believed the human face capable of.

"I have been watching him watch her since we walked in," Melissa informed the table, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with David’s inner life. "This entire morning. He nearly walked into a pillar when we first arrived."

"I did not walk into a pillar —"

"Nearly."

"Melissa, you are ruining my sacred repetition."

"Darling," Melissa said, returning to her cappuccino, "I am launching you."

Landon slapped the table exploding into laughter, he was after all not the only amateur of the boys.

Brian’s shoulders shook with silent laughter into Rhea’s hair.

And Phei — leaning back in his chair at the head of the Empyrean Dining Hall’s oval table, the sovereign weight of the morning’s violence still faintly humming through his body, his women laughing around him, his crew losing their composure, a dragged-away Heavenchild prince and a peed patch of marble and a livestream of five hundred thousand viewers all currently settling into the cosmic ledger as the public, televised, irreversible announcement that the Prince of Earth had just been made a footnote in a seventeen-year-old Cosmic Dragon’s breakfast —

Phei grinned.

And joined the roast.