On the staircase, the words landed like bombs.
lissa’s hand flew to her mouth. Not in surprise — in recognition. The recognition of a woman hearing a secret she’d carried alone for years finally spoken aloud by soone else, and the relief and the horror of it hitting simultaneously like two trains colliding in her chest.
Victoria’s head turned to Danton.
Slowly. The way a gun turret turns. She looked at the boy she’d called brother — the boy she’d smiled at and said I’m happy to finally have a little brother — and sothing behind her eyes rearranged itself.
Not anger. Not yet.
The anger would co later, and when it ca it would burn the world down.
What she felt now was the specific, surgical shock of a person realising they’ve been lied to so thoroughly that even their love was built on counterfeit foundations.
Sienna — always the calm one, always the porcelain mask, always the girl who felt nothing where others felt everything — felt the ground fall away beneath her.
Not taphorically. The void pulsed, and for one instant Sienna could have sworn the marble under her feet went transparent, revealing nothing underneath, but a bottomless dark that went all the way down and never stopped.
Everything she thought she knew about herself, her family, her blood — Harold’s blood, which she’d been told ran in her veins, which she’d built her identity around, which she’d used to justify the cold precision she applied to everything — was a lie?
She looked down at her own hands.
Whose hands were these?
Whose blood ran through them?
The questions hit her in a wave that had no answers and no shore, and for the first ti in Sienna Maxton’s seventeen years of carefully controlled existence, she had no idea who she was.
Danton stood at the bottom of the stairs, and he knew.
He knew because of how Phei had said it — his bastard boy — without looking at him. Without needing to.
The way you ntion furniture.
Danton’s face had gone beyond white into sothing translucent, the blood draining so completely he looked like a sketch of a person rather than an actual one.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
No words ca out because there were no words for the mont when the secret that has protected you your entire life is spoken aloud in a room full of the people it was designed to protect you from.
His eyes found Victoria’s.
She was already looking at him.
The expression on her face was the last thing he’d see before everything changed.
Harold spat a mouthful of blood and teeth directly into Phei’s face.
The crimson splattered across the boy’s cheek, his jaw, the bridge of his nose. The blood froze on contact — turning to black-ice crystals that glittered on his skin like a mask of frozen contempt.
"You... know nothing..." Harold’s voice was a wet, defiant rasp, bubbling through the ruin of his mouth. "She was mine to do with as I pleased... I made this family... I built this legacy—"
Phei’s fist slamd into Harold’s jaw.
CRUNCH.
Harold’s head whipped sideways. More teeth flew — spinning through the void-storm, catching the glacial light, each one trailing a thread of blood that froze into a red-black strear.
Phei grabbed him by the throat again, lifted him from the wall, and threw him upward.
Harold smashed into the ceiling. His body embedded in the plaster and wood, arms and legs splayed, debris raining around him. For one grotesque instant he looked like a man crucified against the sky — pinned to the ceiling of his own house by the force of a boy he’d spent ten years trying to break.
Phei followed.
He leapt— and drove both fists into Harold’s gut mid-air.
BAM. BAM. BAM.
Each blow sent shockwaves through the mansion’s skeleton. The ceiling pulsed and cracked in widening circles. Plaster and timber rained down.
Harold coughed blood in thick ropes — dark, arterial, the kind that ca from places deep inside that were never supposed to be opened.
"I was her father..." Harold snarled through ruined lips, through broken teeth, through a jaw that was dislocating and a throat that was closing and lungs that were filling with fluid. Still defiant. Still speaking.
Still Harold Fucking Maxton until the last syllable. "You are nothing but a—"
Phei drove one final, rciless punch into Harold’s sternum.
The impact blew through the wall behind him. Harold’s body embedded deep into the stone and concrete, unconscious at last — arms hanging, legs limp, blood pouring from a dozen fractures, ribs caved, face a pulped mask of defiance that still looked like it was arguing even in defeat.
Even unconscious, his jaw was set. Even broken, his expression said I built this.
The mansion pulsed one last ti — a final, world-ending throb that made the entire estate tremble from foundation to rooftop — and then the violence stopped.
Silence.
The specific silence that follows catastrophe — not the absence of sound but the presence of shock, the quiet that exists in the gap between the explosion and the screaming, before the world rembers it’s supposed to react.
Phei descended.
Not or floating. Sothing in between — a controlled drift, his feet finding the shattered marble floor with a softness that was obscene given what those sa feet had been doing thirty seconds ago.
The void-storm still raged around him but quieter now, the tendrils pulling closer to his body, the frozen shards of starlight orbiting tighter, the abyssal winds dropping from a howl to a moan.
Danton was already crawling backward on his arse, piss trailing behind him on the black-ice floor, face white with a terror that had nothing to do with the beating and everything to do with the three words Phei had spoken — his bastard boy — that had just detonated the only identity Danton had ever known.
Phei didn’t spare him a glance.
He walked through the ruined hall — the void-storm parting around him like a cloak, the floor cracking in black-ice fractals with every step, the mansion groaning around him, walls bowing, ceiling sagging, the structure listing further to the left as if the house was too tired to stand straight and was leaning toward collapse the way an old man leans toward sleep.
He reached the staircase.
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