Success.
That single, triumphant word echoed through Cassiopeia’s mind like a stolen lody as the long, dark car glided away from the Maxton ancestral mansion, threading its way through the patient, whispering hedgerows toward the distant gates.
Success... she had truly done it.
She had not only deceived the stupid, self-important n of her own house — her father, her uncles, the small ancient parliant of patriarchs who had spent the afternoon leaning across the long oak table receiving her report with the grave, patient attention they reserved for intelligence they believed they had paid for — but she had also fooled the overestimated, oh-so-mighty Awakened Jörmungandr Prince himself. Danton... the very Progenitor of her Bloodline, albeit, unawakened.
The newly-anointed apex predator of the Maxton lineage, Danton, recently awakened, recently insufferable and as if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the cake was the fact that he recently was incapable of looking at his own aunt without that small, sovereign condescension of a man who believed his awakening had also awakened, by so unfortunate magical extension, his divine right to dismiss her.
He had not seen through a single word.
Not one syllable.
’Not that wise, are we now, huh, Danton?’
If she’d been telling that bullshit to her Master, Cassiopeia was very sure he would seen through it the mont she started the second sentence.
’And he’s supposed to be the pillar of the family against, Master, and the Ryujin Tiamats? A pity!’
She scoffed.
Danton had not only sat at the head of that long table, sipping his coffee with aristocratic entitlent, and asked her a series of follow-up questions she had rehearsed for hours in a small, embrace of her Master, on the other side of an ocean — a man who had dictated every preferred phrasing with calm, devastating precision.
But Danton had also had swallowed those carefully crafted answers with the slow, approving nod of like he was being told exactly what he wanted to hear from a mole he had planted in his enemy’s circle and he had long since decided she was incapable of telling him anything else.
’Gullible bastard.’
Cassiopeia had nodded with perfect demure grace.
Cassiopeia had been the very picture of obedient daughterhood and kept playing, for one long, sovereign hour, the small, pretty, dutiful instrunt the Maxton parliant had been grooming since she was s even — and the parliant, like the small, pretty, dutiful parliant it had always been, had swallowed every honeyed lie without suspicion.
’I wanted, very badly, to laugh.’
But she did not laugh, from sheer self-control she had not laughed.
But now she could.
The car purred through the grand gates.
Beneath the small, obedient, devoted slave that Phei’s won saw each day — the Cassiopeia who bowed so eagerly, who folded herself so willingly into whatever shape the room required, the Cassiopeia who had earned a kind of Phei’s slave legend among Maddie, Sienna, and his won for the slightly concerning enthusiasm with which she greeted her own exquisite subjugation — beneath that carefully crafted slave lived a different woman entirely.
A woman the Maxtons had built and had spent ticulous years forging in secret fire.
The real Cassiopeia was... precise, that Cassiopeia was... dangerous, rciless even but above all; very deceitful.
The very qualities they had instilled in her since childhood — the cool surgical patience, the knife-edge social discretion, the long-practiced skill at saying exactly the wrong thing in exactly the right tone — had been forged for one purpose: to serve the family.
To extend its reach. To make her, in ti, their perfect instrunt.
What none of them had ever paused to imagine — what none of them, in their long sovereign certainty about what Maxton won were for, had ever considered — was that the sa blade could be turned around; that the sa instrunt could find a new, far more worthy hand...
... And slice their throats too.
That the precise, dangerous, rciless, deceitful daughter they had trained could be unsheathed against the family itself by the simple, devastating expedient of soone else asking her, very politely, with one warm hand resting on the small private place between her ribs that the family had never thought to defend.
That soone had asked.
She had unsheathed her blade and brought it rcilessly with a smile and settled it on their Adam’s apple.
And the family — sitting now in their patient ancient mansion, three generations of patriarchs digesting a report she had personally written under the quiet dictation of a Cosmic Dragon — were operating on intelligence they trusted because their Cassiopeia had delivered it.
’Their good, obedient, loyal Cassiopeia.’
She did not hold back the laugh now.
Quietly. Once. Behind her hand, a soft, wicked sound that tasted like victory and sin.
The hotel driver, in the front seat, did not turn.
Of course, the laugh had not from just that success.
There had been sothing else she had accomplished!
The agreent with her mother.
Cassiopeia had walked out of the ancestral mansion with her phone held very still against her thigh and a small, private contract sitting sowhere behind her teeth — the cool, patient understanding she had reached with Madeleine over the last hour of their tea, the quiet eting of two Maxton won who had discovered, over careful sips and sharper truths, that they had considerably more in common with each other than either had ever been led to believe.
’That is Phase One.’
The first phase of the most important mission Cassiopeia had ever, in her short, obedient life, been entrusted with by her Master.
She’d return to her post beside Phei Ryujin Tiamat with the small, confident assurance to her family that this ti, she would co back with his soul.
And the family — moving now, as they always did when the Destined Day approached, in that kind of blind, ravenous faith that put logic in the back seat and let raw appetite drive — had let her go.
Because they believed; even if she failed to bind Phei, she would buy them ti.
Enough ti to devise another option, another instrunt; a last, death-dealer stroke that would claim Phei’s life before the Destined Day arrived and turned him into the kind of problem they could no longer solve.
They could not afford an eyesore like Phei. The bloodlines they needed — the ones whose progenitors had to be brought back — were the very bloodlines Phei had begun, with the slow, sovereign patience of a man who knew exactly what he was protecting, to shelter as his own i.e. Sierra.
And it would be more if they waited for so long.
’Master’s a threat to their success.’
He was a problem.
She knew so of their plans.
She did not know all of them.
She had, in fact, the sa access her mother had — which was to say, the access of the only two week won in a family of n and old generation old grandmas.
The two won held so significant authority but nothing close to the real power.
She received orders. Sotis she received the reasons and often she received only the orders, with the small civil expectation that a Maxton daughter did not require reasons, only directions.
What the n had not yet understood — and would not understand until the door of their own house opened on them from the inside — was that she had spent the last several monts of her life delivering those reason-less orders to another man.
And that man had the patience, and the appetite, to read between the orders and find the entire treacherous architecture beneath them.
He’d been finding it.
Steadily...
Patiently...
The car ca around the long, sweeping curve of the Infinity Chaos approach.
Her whole body buzzed once in excitent — the warmth of returning to clear range now that she called ho. Phei was up there, probably operating sowhere on the high, dangerous end of the board.
She did not, imdiately, go to him.
She got out of the car at the lobby and took the private elevator before she stepped out onto the long, hushed hall of the top floor.
Phei’s penthouse doors waited at the end of the hall.
Huge... pale... closed.
She paused and looked at them.
The bond with her Master was warm against her soul like a living ember. He was there.
He must be fed now and entertained and probably half-naked and definitely amused, and the mont she walked through those doors she could fold herself back into the patient, devoted slave she had been waiting to wear for him this whole ti; the long, sovereign quiet of monts he spent being industriously fucking her through her mother’s tea would soften, gradually, into the warm, safe place she actually lived now.
She wanted that.
She wanted it so badly it ached.
Cassiopeia turned, instead, walked off to another door and knocked.
There was a pause before the door opened.
A woman stood in it.
The two of them looked at each other for a long, quiet mont — the kind of weighted look two won exchanged when each had spent considerable ti in the other’s vicinity and had not yet found a universe in which to be honest with one another.
Cassiopeia did not, imdiately, smile. lissa did not, imdiately, frown.
Then lissa eventually stepped aside and let Cassiopeia walk in.
Was the penthouse next door larger than Cassiopeia rembered? Or perhaps was it simply that the Maxton ancestral mansion had recalibrated her sense of scale, leaving everything else feeling strangely intimate?
No, it had to be the chilling cold gaze of lissa!
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