Two jets sat on the private tarmac at Paradise International, noses pointed in the same direction, fuselages gleaming under the afternoon sun that bounced off white paint and polished chrome until the whole runway shimmered like a mirage.

The Price family jet was already running. Engines cycling, stairs deployed, cabin pressurised and waiting. Staff had loaded the luggage an hour ago.

Everything was ready because — the machinery of departure had been set in motion long before the family arrived, because Fenris Silverblood did not wait for runways.

Thirty metres to the right, the Heavenchild jet sat in identical readiness. Larger. Sleeker. Because of course it was the Earth’s most powerful family’s jet.

Abigail Price stood at the base of the jet stairs.

She wore a fitted charcoal coat that fell to mid-thigh, belted at the waist, collar turned up against wind that wasn’t cold enough to justify it. Beneath it, a cream silk blouse tucked into high-waisted black trousers that tapered to pointed heels — Louboutin, the red soles flashing with each step she didn’t take.

Hair pulled back in a low chignon, clean and severe.

No jewellery except a single watch — thin, gold, Swiss, the face so small you’d need to lean close to read it.

One hand rested on the stair railing. One foot on the first step.

She didn’t climb because a sound reached her ears from across the tarmac — high, bright, breathless — and she turned her head.

Two girls were running toward the Heavenchild jet.

Blonde hair catching the sun like spun gold, legs tangling with each other’s, hands clasped between them so tightly their knuckles had gone white. They were laughing — giddy, shrieking, voices pitched high and breathless because they’d just been handed something they wanted so badly they’d forgotten how to walk like civilised people.

Paige and Brielle Heavenchild.

Their hot, sinfully perfect bodies moved with unrestrained, bouncy energy. Full, perky breasts — beneath thin silk camisoles that did almost nothing to contain them. With every stride those generous tits leaped and swayed, nipples clearly outlined and begging for attention.

They looked like temptation wrapped in teenage innocence — bodies built for worship and ruin, the kind that made men forget God and drop to their knees.

Behind them, a maid followed at a measured pace — mid-height, full-figured, dark hair threaded with silver — pulling two designer suitcases across the tarmac with the unhurried calm of a woman who’d learned long ago that young ladies ran and staff followed and the distance between them was simply how the world worked.

Her uniform was pressed. Her expression was warm. Her heavy breasts swayed gently with each step, maternal and unremarkable and perfectly, perfectly invisible.

The twins reached the Heavenchild jet stairs and Brielle tripped — one heel catching the bottom step — and Paige caught her arm and they both dissolved into laughter so pure it carried across thirty metres of hot tarmac and landed on Abigail’s ears like something from another life.

Abigail watched them.

Her face didn’t change. Her posture didn’t shift her dark flat eyes tracked the two blonde girls as they climbed the stairs hand-in-hand, still giggling, still flushed bodies radiating that dangerous, angelic heat.

She should have felt pity.

Some part of her — the part that had flinched when Edmund WitchBourne called her Ms. Abigail, the part that had recognised herself in Eleanor’s position before crushing the recognition like a cigarette — tried to summon it.

Tried to feel something for two seventeen-year-old girls whose family had already decided they were expendable. Whose bodies had been earmarked since birth as vessels for something ancient and hungry.

Whose laughter would end, eventually, when they learned what duty as Heavenchilds actually meant.

The pity didn’t come. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

It couldn’t.

Because Abigail Price was about to sacrifice a girl too.

Eleanor WitchBourne would keep her life — that much was true. She’d survive the wedding night. She’d wake up the next morning in a Price bed with a Price ring on her finger and a Price name replacing everything she’d been.

Her body would be intact. Her heart would keep beating. Her lungs would keep breathing.

But the bloodline — the ancient, dormant power sleeping in her virgin blood, the reincarnation of the First WitchBourne Witch that Eleanor didn’t even know she carried — that would be gone. Extracted and bound to the Price family through sacred union, transferred through a ritual disguised as consummation, stolen so cleanly that Eleanor would never understand what she’d lost.

She’d live.

Just... less.

These two girls wouldn’t even get that mercy. The Heavenchild twins were headed for the same fate as every other daughter whose family needed a male vessel — sacrifice, transformation, erasure. Fed to the Maxton machinery so Shekinah could reincarnate properly.

So, the other half of the First Angel could return.

At least Eleanor would breathe afterward.

Paige and Brielle wouldn’t breathe at all.

They were the worst and unfortunate reflections of Eleanor.

"Abigail." Her father’s voice carried from inside the cabin.

She shook her head — a small, private gesture, barely a movement — and climbed the stairs. Her heels clicked against each step. The tarmac heat gave way to pressurised cool. The afternoon glare dimmed to soft cabin lighting as she ducked through the doorway and entered the jet’s interior.

Brown leather and polished mahogany, crystal glassware already set in holders, catching light from recessed fixtures that cast everything in warm amber.

The Price jet was decorated with the restrained luxury of people who had nothing left to prove — no gold plating, no ostentatious flourishes, just materials so expensive they didn’t need to announce themselves.

Her eyes swept the cabin.

Found Evan first. Slouched in his seat, jaw tight, staring at nothing — publicly humiliated at breakfast and still wearing it. The bruises Eleanor had left on his face — which the Prices refused to heal — had faded to yellow-green shadows along his cheekbone.

He looked smaller than usual. Diminished. A playboy with the play beaten out of him.

Anderson was sitting upright, posture rigid, hands flat on his thighs in that particular way he’d adopted since Grandmother had asked him a question he’d answered correctly and been rewarded with the privilege of sitting back down.

A huge scar bisected his face in a clean line, pink-black and raised and permanent. His eyes were forward. His breathing was controlled. He looked like a soldier waiting for orders he already knew would hurt.

Abigail sat across from her father.

Fenris watched her settle. Grey eyes, wet stone, revealing nothing. He’d seen her pause at the stairs. He’d seen whatever had crossed her face — or hadn’t crossed it — while she watched the tarmac.

"What were you looking at?"

Abigail crossed one leg over the other. Smoothed the fabric of her trousers across her knee.

"Heaven’s little lambs."

Fenris turned to the window.

Through the oval glass, the Heavenchild tarmac scene played out in miniature — the twins had disappeared inside their jet, and now two more figures approached from the waiting convoy.

Elliot Heavenchild walked like he owned the ground beneath his feet and the sky above it, immaculate in a dark suit, not a hair displaced. Half a step behind him, Marcus followed — silver eyes catching the light, posture perfect, hands clasped behind his back.

Father and son. Patriarch and heir. Walking toward the same jet that carried two girls they’d both agreed to destroy.

Fenris watched them climb the stairs. Watched the Heavenchild jet door close. Watched the ground crew begin disconnecting the fuel line.

Then he turned back to Abigail.

"Unfortunately," he said, "now that the Jörmungandr Prince has awakened, the little lambs have no one to save them." His voice carried no emotion and no regret. Flat as a market report.

"Not even Phei, if he felt merciful. The Maxtons have no one standing in their way anymore. Danton is untouchable now. Things will proceed as they planned. Flawlessly."

Abigail said nothing. The math was already done for years, by people smarter than mercy and colder than hope.

Across the cabin, Anderson smiled.

It split the scar — pink-black flesh stretching, the healed line pulling tight across his cheek — and turned his face into something grotesque. Eager. Hungry. He’d knelt on marble and swallowed his scream and filed every ounce of humiliation away for later use.

Now it was paying dividends.

With Danton, we’ll take down the arrogant charity case. Put him back in his place — the gutter, the bottom, the nowhere he’d crawled out of. And those girls he’d collected, those princesses he thought belonged to him — Sierra, Maddie, Amber, Elena, all of them — we’ll be taken by us.

Claimed. Used however we see fit. And then, when the screaming is done and the vessels are prepared, we progenitors would awaken in their rightful bodies. The First Devil. The Original Angel’s other half. All of them, reborn at full power, in flesh designed to hold them.

Nothing would go wrong.

It couldn’t.

They had Danton. They had centuries of planning and god-level witchcraft and the combined weight of every Legacy family that had ever signed their daughters’ death warrants in exchange for progenitor supremacy.

What does Phei have?

A harem? Some ice powers?

Anderson’s smile widened. The scar pulsed.

Nothing would ever go wrong.

Abigail watched her brother’s smile from across the cabin.

Shook her head and looked at the Heavenchilds jet and sighed.

Little lambs... all of them.