The moon had no business being here; it had already done its work tonight spilling its silver over tangled sheets in another penthouse across the island tracing the trembling curve of lissa’s spine and watched shadows soften, pride surrender, and two wounded hearts speak in the only language too honest for polite society:
And attended the first act with that pale, ancient indifference celestial bodies loved to pretend was dignity but while the moon had observed; it never judged nothing aloud, and by any reasonable schedule, should have moved on to illuminate so quieter corner of the night.
And yet it followed them here:
Its light threaded through the golden blaze of Downtown Paradise, slipping between towers and glass like a patient ghost, until it reached Roxanne’s chevron windows and entered the penthouse.
The pale silver mingled with the city’s amber and platinum radiance, pouring across marble, couch, wineglass, skin, and shadow with the serene confidence of an uninvited guest who knew no one present had the authority to dismiss it.
The sa moon and silver, following Phei and lissa across the island, through a tear in reality, and into this room as if the night’s final act could not proceed without its pale attendance.
As if it had unfinished business with the won gathered around the Young Dragon.
Phei walked to the window; Downtown Paradise bowed beneath him.
From this height, the city looked less like a place and more like an enormous altar to wealth, sin, and excellent lighting. Towers stabbed upward in disciplined ranks, their windows burning with inherited arrogance with roads curving below in molten veins, gold traffic flowing through the black body of the tropolis like a slow hemorrhage of privilege.
Paradise glittered with that practiced magnificence only rotten things perfected, because ugliness, when funded properly, often learned to wear diamonds and call itself civilization.
Phei stood before all of it with his hands in his pockets.
There was no need for a throne, a crown or so ridiculous cloak snapping behind him in an indoor breeze that would have made no physical sense but would absolutely have pleased certain dramatic bloodlines. He simply stood there, and the room adjusted around him.
Phei had learned this posture atop the Sovereign Tower.
That obsidian spear of arrogance he could see in a single turn of the head and found, again and again, insufficient. Up there, the city’s lies looked small.
The moon watched him from above.
Its white-silver glow fell across his shoulders and the side of his face, catching the dark calm of his profile.
It made Phei look older than seventeen years had any right to permit, though age had long since beco a poor asurent for whatever lived behind his eyes.
The boy had suffered too much, gained too much, loved too deeply, and broken too many ordinary categories for a number to hold him properly.
Ti, like most things in his life, had tried to apply rules and quietly embarrassed itself.
The moonlight did not rely illuminate him, it seed to regard him.
Patiently. Suspiciously. Like a celestial auditor assembling evidence after observing one too many impossible nights.
Sowhere in the bureaucratic imagination of the heavens, a file on Phei Ryujin Tiamat had surely beco obscenely thick. Charges might include misuse of cosmic authority, emotional overcrowding, reckless portal etiquette, and repeated violence against the concept of moderation.
’Or perhaps the moon is not judging at all.’
Perhaps it was guarding him?
A silver sentinel stationed above Paradise, keeping watch over a dragon, two broken won, and a reconciliation so delicate that even the air seed afraid of speaking too loudly. What lunar intervention could possibly achieve in a penthouse containing Phei, lissa, and Roxanne remained unclear.
Astronomy had never been built for this sort of nonsense. Theology on the other hand, had probably resigned several Chapters ago.
Still, the light reminded him of soone;
’That particular silverly softness and gentleness.’
Not truly cold. Luminous in the way frost could be beautiful when warmth lived beneath it, like fire seen through ice.
It carried the mory of silver hair, her small hands that curled around him in her sleep, and a fragile body resting sowhere safe after a long, overwhelming night.
The thought ca softly.
Phei held it for a few seconds, careful as a man cupping a candle in a corridor filled with drafts and then it disappeared from his mory.
Behind him, two won occupied the sa room without a script between them for the first ti.
And two syllables still hung in the air like a thrown dagger that had sohow landed handle-first:
Hey, Bitch.
Roxanne had not moved.
She sat upright on the couch where Phei’s voice had startled her from the half-sleep of grief, one hand still resting on the pillow behind her, the other hovering near her side as if it had forgotten the original plan halfway through existing.
Her dark honey hair spilled in loose disarray over her shoulders.
Her eyes were wide, wet, unguarded, carrying the dazed bewildernt being pulled from old sorrow by the last two people in Paradise she had expected to find appearing in her living room after midnight.
Her gaze moved from Phei’s silhouette at the window to lissa.
Then back again.
The moonlight touched Roxanne’s face and softened it.
For one brief, cruelly beautiful mont, it erased the years that no healing power could reach imdiately.
The invisible habits Jonathan had carved into her body remained, but the silver light gentled them: the instinct to brace, the quick suppression of emotion, the trained silence, the reflexive need to appear composed before anyone could weaponize her weakness.
Under that light, she looked like the woman she might have been if the world had been less fond of turning girls into wives, wives into prisoners, and prisoners into performances.
lissa stood a few steps away with her arms folded beneath her chest.
Her posture radiated imperial composure.
She had entered another woman’s penthouse uninvited, through a portal, after midnight, and sohow still looked like the room should apologize for not being ready. Dark cashre. Damp hair gathered into a low knot. Shoulders squared. Expression cool, severe, and impossible to read unless one had spent years studying her face for signs of incoming social artillery:
Roxanne had done exactly that.
Which made lissa’s expression all the more terrifying.
"Did you just..." Roxanne’s voice erged hoarse fragility. "Did you just call bitch?"
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A/N:Guys, I do not just love ntioning the moon, so do you realize sothing about it from the mont they’d arrived in Hell’s Paradise or not?
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