Three steps behind the Price family, the Heavenchild contingent stood in their own shadowed cluster, silent as a gathering of wolves who had just realized the deer they were hunting had grown claws — and fangs.
Elliot Heavenchild occupied the fore, silver-haired and immaculate, his public face an impenetrable mask — flat enough to reveal nothing, yet sohow conveying that any soul foolish enough to attempt reading it would live to regret the presumption.
Marcus stood at his right shoulder, jaw clenched so tightly the muscle along his temple twitched with every asured breath. Half-hidden between two towering marble columns, eyes wide and hands clasped tightly before them, lingered Paige and Brielle.
And drifting behind the twins, once more clad in her deliberately unremarkable maid’s uniform — soft, full-figured, and utterly invisible to anyone who did not know the ancient terror she truly embodied — walked Anahita.
Marcus saw what Anderson saw.
He simply felt it far more acutely — a knife slowly turning in wounds that had never been allowed to heal.
Sierra Montgory on Phei’s arm like she had always belonged there. Maddie Whitmore bouncing at his elbow like an overjoyed fla given human form. Elena Ashford laughing into his ear with a warmth she had never once offered Marcus across seven long, fruitless years.
Amber Castellano further back, draped languidly against Yuki Tanaka, both of them giggling like schoolgirls at sothing on Yuki’s tablet.
Even Delilah — the girl Marcus had once idly catalogued as a future diversion during the long, tedious boredom of his Prince-of-Earth days — now flanked Sierra’s side with easy, settled grace. She had chosen. She had decided who she belonged to.
’Mine.’
The word struck his mind like a cathedral bell tolling inside a tomb he could not escape.
’Mine. Mine. Mine. Every single one of them. Mine.’
Sierra had been promised to him by blood and marriage arrangent. Maddie was the wildcard whose lineage his father had personally requested be preserved through his son but her father told Elliot to go fuck himself.
Elena was the vital Ashford bridge. Amber Castellano, Yuki the Tanaka— a family that had, apparently, been bowing to a different empress in secret for years without ever uttering a single word.
All of them.
’All of them.’
’Now walking through this lobby as though they had always belonged to the stupid dragon.’
Marcus’s teeth ground together with an audible click that echoed through his skull like breaking bone.
A soft, warm voice murmured just behind his shoulder, gentle as silk drawn across naked steel.
"Patience, my Master."
Anahita’s tone — carefully muted by the maid’s disguise — carried only her intimate, soothing cadence as if she had served him across countless lifetis and intended to serve him across countless more.
He could feel the steady pulse of her divine warmth against his back, the slow, relentless healing she continued to weave into his broken body even now, even here, while she walked behind him in an ill-fitting uniform designed to render her invisible to the watching Price family.
"Two weeks," she whispered into his mind. "The healing completes. Your body returns in full. And everything that was promised will arrive exactly where it was promised — including each of those won you are watching.
"Not one is lost. Not one is beyond reach. The dragon is rely borrowing what has always been destined to be yours. The universe will make him return them."
Marcus closed his eyes.
Inhaled.
Exhaled.
Opened them again.
The grinding in his jaw eased. So of the volcanic heat receded... he gave the smallest, controlled nod — a movent only Anahita would notice — and her warmth pulsed against his spine in quiet acknowledgnt.
’She is right. She is always right. Two weeks.’ Then his true strength. Then the powers that had been prepared for him since the mont of his conception would awaken fully.
Then the dragon would learn what it truly ant to stand against a finished Heavenchild.
Two weeks.
He could wait two weeks.
...But.
Marcus’s eyes had not left the elevator bank. Sierra was stepping inside. Maddie bounced in after her. Elena released that soft, crystalline laugh again — the one she had never once directed at him because she always said she found him pathetic, needy and insignificant.
The grinding returned to his jaw, sharper this ti.
’Anahita.’
A pulse of warmth answered between his shoulder blades, soft as a lover’s breath against the nape of his neck. ’Yes, Master?’
’Two weeks is a long ti.’
’It is, Master... but it will pass.’
’Anahita... in those two weeks the dragon will sleep with every one of them. He will make them his. Bond them as his mates. And then he’ll carve himself so deeply into their bodies and souls that removing him becos more painful than letting him stay.’
’Master—’
’I want you to do sothing for .’
The warmth at his back held perfectly still.
’Anything, Master.’
’Get close to him.’ The command ca low and snarling through his mind. ’Use your real body. Not this disguise. Find a corridor, find an evening when he is drinking and his guard is down, and seduce him. That horny little bastard will not last ten seconds before you when you stop hiding what you are. And once he trusts you completely, no matter what you have to do... let him follows you sowhere quiet — sowhere I have prepared — you deliver him.’
’To you, Master.’
’To .’
The warmth pulsed once.
What Anahita felt in that mont, she did not voice aloud... she had stood beside Marcus long enough to read the temperature of his soul from across continents, and what she sensed now was not the calm calculation of a Heavenchild heir playing the long ga.
It was the bright, twitching impatience of a wound that refused to heal because its owner kept tearing at the scab.
He had spoken of two weeks with conviction.
He had even believed it for nearly a full minute. Now the belief had cracked. Now he was already reaching for shortcuts, for faster knives, because his pride could not endure the sight of those won laughing in another boy’s elevator.
She did not say any of that.
To speak the truth would only agitate him further, and an agitated Marcus was a Marcus whose healing slowed by precious hours with every spike of rage. She had delicate work to perform — ancient, ticulous work upon a fractured soul and a ruined body — and such work could not be done while soothing a petulant tantrum.
Instead, Anahita did what she had always done across centuries of service.
"As you command, Master."
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