School ca whether Phei was ready for it or not.
The world didn’t stop spinning just because he’d torn a hole through reality, woken up with void-black eyes, hair the color of frozen starlight, and enough new trauma to make a therapist retire early.
Classes still started at eight.
Attendance still mattered. And apparently, challenges issued before near-death experiences were still very much on the schedule—like the universe had a sadistic calendar app reminding everyone: "Don’t forget to humiliate yourself publicly today, xx."
Sierra and Maddie looked like absolute shit.
Not cute-tired—not that soft, "I stayed up late watching dramas" exhausted that girls could sohow make endearing with ssy buns and oversized hoodies.
No.
This was hollow-eyed, grey-skinned, shuffling-like-zombies territory. Full night without sleep. Watching a boy they cared about breathe frost, bleed darkness, and maybe die in slow motion while they could do exactly fuck-all about it.
They’d kept vigil with lissa the entire ti Phei was unconscious. Rotating shifts. Checking his pulse every hour like it was a full-ti job. Watching snowflakes drift around his head and trying not to scream when his breathing would stop for five, ten, fifteen seconds before jerking back to life like his body was trolling them.
Neither of them had processed what they’d witnessed.
The portal. The void-ice. lissa appearing from thin air with Phei’s broken body in her arms like a fucked-uppietà. The way his eyes had changed—those terrifying, beautiful, wrong eyes that looked at them and saw... nothing.
Like he was already gone and the thing wearing his skin was just borrowing it for a bit.
They hadn’t talked about it.
Hadn’t even tried.
So things were too big for words, and what had happened in that penthouse fell squarely in the category of "if we speak this aloud it becos real and we’ll have to live with it forever."
So, when the Academy gates finally lood ahead, both girls made the sa unspoken decision: sleep first, existential crisis later. Preferably after several hours of unconsciousness and maybe a dically inadvisable amount of caffeine.
"Main Legacy Common Room," Sierra mumbled to Delilah, already veering toward the west wing like her legs were on autopilot. "Wake before the Challenge."
Maddie nodded to Delilah too, too tired to form actual sentences—just a low grunt that probably ant "sa" or "kill now" or both.
They shuffled off together—two Legacy princesses reduced to shambling wrecks by forty-eight hours of terror and sleeplessness—and disappeared into the building without looking back.
lissa had gone ho.
Back to the Maxton mansion. Back to Harold and the kids and the life she was supposed to be living while secretly fucking her husband’s stepson and watching that sa stepson nearly die in her arms.
But she hadn’t gone quietly.
No—lissa Maxton didn’t do quiet. She’d spent twenty years married to a man who treated her like furniture with a pulse; she’d learned exactly how to weaponize boldness in a world that expected her to be decorative and silent.
So, before Phei had even regained consciousness, she’d made her move.
One phone call to the Ashford Madam.
That was all it took.
"Your estate injured him," lissa had said, voice flat, factual, carrying the specific tone of a woman who had leverage and knew exactly how to use it. "He ca to deliver an apology on Harold’s behalf, and he left broken and bleeding. Whatever happened in there—whatever your people did or didn’t do—happened on Ashford property. That makes it your responsibility."
She hadn’t elaborated.
Hadn’t needed to.
The Ashford Madam was many things—ruthless, calculating, terrifyingly competent—but she wasn’t stupid. She understood the implication imdiately: if lissa wanted to make noise about this, she could.
If she wanted to raise questions about why a seventeen-year-old boy had entered the Ashford compound healthy and exited looking like he’d been fed through a at grinder, she had every right.
And in Paradise, where reputation was currency and scandal was bankruptcy, that kind of noise could be devastating.
She had handled it.
Called Harold personally. Explained that Phei had been injured during his visit—so vague excuse about a security incident, an overzealous guard, sothing plausible enough that Harold wouldn’t dig deeper. Even though she knew no jackshit.
She’d taken responsibility. Offered compensation. Made the appropriate apologetic noises that powerful families made when they’d accidentally damaged soone else’s property.
Because that’s what Phei was to Harold, wasn’t he?
Property.
A charity case he kept around out of obligation and used as a punching bag for his disappointnts. Of course Harold had accepted the Ashford Madam’s explanation without question.
Why wouldn’t he?
One of the most powerful woman in Paradise was apologizing to him. Stroking his ego. Treating his stepson’s injuries like a diplomatic incident worth her personal attention.
Harold had probably felt important for the first ti in months. Probably jerked off to the mory of it later.
lissa had watched her husband preen over the phone call with the sa expression she always wore around him now: polite. Distant. Counting the days until she could stop pretending.
Before she’d left the penthouse that morning, though, lissa had done sothing that still hadn’t fully registered with Sierra and Maddie.
She’d kissed Phei.
Not on the cheek. Not on the forehead. Not the chaste, maternal peck that might have been explainable as concern or relief.
On the mouth.
Slow. Deliberate. Possessive.
Right in front of both girls.
Sierra’s jaw had actually dropped—physically dropped, like a cartoon character witnessing sothing impossible. Maddie had made a sound like a small animal being stepped on. Neither of them had moved.
Neither had spoken.
They’d just... stared.
And lissa had pulled back from Phei’s lips, brushed a strand of white hair from his forehead, and smiled the soft, secret smile of a woman who’d stopped pretending to care about appearances.
"I’ll see you at the ga, babe," she’d murmured.
Then she’d walked out.
Heels clicking. Hips swaying. Not a single backward glance.
The shock still hadn’t worn off.
Now they knew who the secret Harem mber was.
Sierra and Maddie hadn’t discussed it—hadn’t been able to find words for the fact that Harold Maxton’s wife had just kissed Harold Maxton’s charity case like they were lovers, like it was normal, like they’d done it a thousand tis before.
Which, of course, they had.
But the girls didn’t know that.
Not yet.
The ga.
Right.
That was still happening.
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