The adjoining room was hers for the trip.

A smaller second bedroom inside Marcus’s Infinity Chaos suite, claimed by his staff the night they arrived and turned into whatever passed for her space — a bed dressed in Heavenchild-crested linen no one would ever sleep in, an armchair facing a window she had learned not to look through, a writing desk stocked with the tools of her service, and a small kitchenette along the far wall.

A full-length mirror stood opposite the bed. She used it because centuries had beaten into her the habit of checking her projection before every summons, even in rooms she would leave behind in a week.

She did not think of it as hers.

She thought of it as the place she waited between being needed.

She entered now, cheek still warm from the slap, sat there for a few breathes before she went out again and began preparing the food.

Marcus had not spoken the order. He never had to. Danton’s arrival had shifted the day, and Anahita — bound to Marcus by the old thread that let her read his vessel’s immediate hungers — understood the moment he gestured her out of the bedroom exactly what was required: lunch for two, light wine, a second setting for the Jörmungandr heir who had appeared like smoke above the bed.

So, she moved.

Quiet. Precise. Beautiful in the way old, broken things can still be beautiful when they have forgotten how to be anything else.

Her hands worked through the suite’s kitchen.

She sliced cold poached lamb. Fanned it across bone china in careful arcs. Scattered pomegranate seeds that caught the low light like drops of blood too polite to stain. She dressed fennel so thin it trembled on the knife. Warmed sheep’s-milk cheese against the palm of her own hand because warmth was one of the few small mercies her Original Angel nature still permitted her to give.

She decanted the 2007 Barolo into crystal that had once been a gift from some European monarch whose name Marcus’s father had probably forgotten.

She carried the heavy silver tray back into the bedroom with the careful posture of someone who had learned, long ago, that dropping anything earned more than bruises.

Marcus was propped against the headboard now, colour slowly returning as her proximity fed the healing cycle he took for granted. Danton lounged in an antique chair beside the bed, barefoot, one leg crossed over the other, looking like a man who had never once in his life been made to stand anywhere he didn’t want to be.

He was already talking.

"— because honestly, Marcus, the boy’s coming-out party just happened on five hundred thousand screens. I don’t know how you come back from that. You might genuinely need to consider leaving public eye for a year. Hahahaha... the Maxton Swiss estate is extremely private, I could fly you there, you know how much I care for you. There are no livestreams and phones there."

Marcus’s eyes found Anahita as she entered.

"Set it there."

She placed the tray on the bedside table. Transferred his plate, his glass, his water, his napkin onto the smaller tray across his lap. She did the same for Danton on the side table, adjusting the angle so the Jörmungandr heir would not have to reach.

Then she stepped back to the precise distance she had been trained to occupy — three feet behind Marcus’s right shoulder — and became furniture.

Danton glanced at her once.

His gaze moved over her projection the way a man checks the finish on another man’s car. Pleasant. Expensive. Not his.

"Where’d you pick this up."

Marcus cut into his lamb without looking up.

"Private acquisition. Three years ago. She came with an NDA."

"Mm. Good skin. Good silhouette. Long service?"

"Indefinite."

"Mm."

Danton returned to his plate.

Anahita stood exactly where she was supposed to stand, the faint smile she wore for these moments fixed in place like paint on porcelain. It had taken her seven hundred years to perfect that smile. It cost her nothing now because there was nothing left in her that still wanted to be seen.

"So." Danton chewed, swallowed, sipped the Barolo. "Tell me the damage."

"Everything."

Marcus’s voice was flat.

"The livestream hit five hundred thousand before even the minute passed thanks to David, that bitch. Clips are already everywhere. My father’s people caught the first mirror uploads from the recorded live stream in six minutes. By tonight it will be a million views. By tomorrow, ten. And it isn’t ordinary scandal, Danton. It travels on spite.

"Every person who has ever hated a Heavenchild now has ninety seconds of me on marble in my own piss. That kind of footage doesn’t die quietly."

A pause.

"And my father cannot seem to reach Madam Ashford."

"Cannot reach."

"She was at his table. At Phei’s table. Watching the whole thing two seats away. I don’t know what that means for the rivals that have been there for decades between our houses. Nobody does. But every Legacy on this island is going to read that signal by nightfall and start moving their pieces. Now that everyone knows how powerful Phei’s background is, now that both women of Ashford family are with him, other Legacies might lean in favor of Phei and Ashfords."

Danton whistled softly. "That’s going to be a headache... and a shift of power in Paradise, you’re going to be counting this for months."

He took another bite, then glanced toward the space behind Marcus’s shoulder without really seeing it.

"More wine, darling."

It was not a request.

Anahita stepped forward. Refilled his glass to the exact level and stepped back. The smile did not move.

Neither man thanked her.

They talked for forty minutes.

Anahita listened with the quiet, perfect attention she gave every conversation that happened within her hearing. Short-term containment. Flood the feeds with better stories. Medium-term reframing. Make it Marcus’s personal failure rather than a crack in the Legacy order itself. Long-term, Danton offered — casually, between sips of wine — to handle Phei Ryujin Tiamat when the timing was right. The Destined Day. Or sooner, if the boy pushed.

Marcus accepted it.

Anahita watched his face.

Watched the slow, ugly resentment that moved behind his eyes when another man offered, over lunch she had prepared, to eventually kill the one who had put him on the floor. Not relief. Not gratitude. Just the bitter knowledge that Danton could promise what Marcus could not yet deliver.

Danton saw the resentment.

Danton enjoyed every second of it.

When the second glass was empty, Danton stood, stretched, and crossed to the bed. He clapped Marcus on the shoulder hard enough to make the half-healed ribs protest.

"Chin up, Prince of Earth. It’s just one morning in one long life."

Anahita remained exactly where she was — three feet behind the right shoulder, silent, smiling faintly at nothing.

The tray she had carried was still heavy in her memory. The slap on her cheek had cooled to a dull throb. Somewhere in the city below, five hundred thousand people were still laughing at the man she was bound to serve.

And she stood there, invisible in plain sight, while two Legacy heirs decided how best to use the boy she would soon be sent to seduce and betray.

Because that was what rooms like this were for.

And that was what she was for.

Until the day someone finally decided she was no longer useful.

Or until the day the Dragon whose pages she was ordered to steal decided she was worth more than the chains she wore.

She did not let herself wonder which would come first.

She simply stood.

Three feet behind the shoulder.

Waiting to be needed again.

Danton glanced at Anahita.

Offered her, for the first time, a direct smile.

"Take care of him, darling. He’ll need it."

Then he was gone — folded back out through the membrane of space the same way he had come, the subtle displacement closing behind him like a curtain being drawn, the suite returning to its muffled occupied silence.

The moment Danton’s presence fully released the room, Marcus shattered the wine glass in anger, rage and humiliation.

It shattered on the cream carpet.

Dark red soaked immediately into the wool in a spreading stain that would, Anahita knew, take six hours of professional cleaning to remove.

"Clean that up."

"Yes, my lord."

Anahita knelt on the carpet in her small form and began, with her bare hands, to gather the shards of the broken glass.