"Better than imagined, Master." Her voice dropped, low and a little hoarse, still humming with the lingering pleasure of his strokes. "Better than we originally intended."

Phei’s eyebrow lifted in silent invitation as his fingers continued their slow, patient journey through her hair.

"Now you’ve piqued my curiosity," he murmured. "Do tell, my dear."

A small smile curved her lips against his thigh. She inhaled him in again before she said; "Well... you sent me to investigate, to see if we could break the witch out if the circumstances allowed. Right?"

"Exactly that was the plan, my dear." He nodded.

That had indeed been the mission he had given Cassiopeia after learning everything about Danton, the Maxtons, and the other families’ schemes. He had wanted to steal the witch away to ensure their plans against the girls would fail, though he had known they had prepared in advance.

Still, claiming a Lesser God was hardly a loss.

"Right. So..." She shifted her cheek just enough to find a more comfortable angle against his thigh, never breaking the contact from his soul-catching eyes. "Turns out you didn’t have to lift a finger."

Phei’s hand paused for the briefest breath before resuming its gentle stroking. "Explain."

"We got help." She tilted her head to meet his gaze, her eyes still heavy-lidded from the touch of his fingers. "Dravenna and this mysterious Madam—" she lifted her fingers briefly from his calf to make air quotes around the word "—had everything mapped out before we even arrived. With Sienna’s assistance, we extracted the witch entirely. Whole. Intact and they took her away somewhere safe."

She paused.

"She’s with Dravenna now."

Phei’s fingers kept moving through her hair. His expression remained unchanged — no surprise, no confusion — just the same patient, tender attention and the quiet smile that had lingered at the corner of his mouth since she settled between his knees.

Because he already knew most of it.

Eira had whispered fragments into his mind hours earlier — Dravenna’s involvement, the witch’s extraction, but not exactly how Sienna had helped.

He wanted Cassiopeia’s full report anyway, not because he doubted her, but because he was beginning to sense that the shards Eira had given him and the shards Cassiopeia could recount were two different stories, two different shapes, and the truth lived in the gap between them.

"And?" he asked gently.

Cassiopeia’s face suddenly lit up.

"Master — did you know storage rings are real?"

The question burst out bright and almost childlike like a quiet delight of a scholar who had spent years reading about something and had finally, impossibly, watched it work before her own eyes.

"Imagine my surprise. I’ve only ever read about them in the Legacy Books — magical artifacts capable of holding objects in folded space. I always thought they were myths, stories the old families told to explain away things they couldn’t understand."

Her hand gave his calf a light squeeze. "Then I watched one swallow Supreme Celestial artifacts and produced something capable enough to hold a Lesser God witch in a single heartbeat. Gone. As if they’d never existed. I saw it, Master. With my own eyes."

Phei kept his face carefully composed.

Keep smiling. Keep stroking. Don’t give her anything.

"Hmm." His fingers traced slow circles at the crown of her head. "But surely the Maxtons have such artifacts? Your family has stood for generations. Even a lesser witch should be able to produce one."

Cassiopeia shook her head against his thigh. "No — or not quite." Her grip on his leg tightened as she corrected herself. "The witch could indeed manipulate space, yes. Make a small room become bigger on the inside. Extend the walls of a mansion so ten guest suites fit into what looks like three. That kind of spatial work exists — I’ve seen it happen — walked through it."

Her brow furrowed slightly.

"But a storage ring? A real one that folds space around objects and carries them in your pocket or you wear in on your finger? Even the witch said that requires specific materials. Ancient things. And apparently this world doesn’t have them anymore. Or never did so she couldn’t create us some. Whatever Sienna used... it shouldn’t exist here, Master."

Phei just smiled.

He kept stroking her hair.

Inside, his mind raced.

Chaos.

His grandmother was getting involved again — more than before, much more. First, she had sent Rune Natsuki to help in the divorce, give him wealth his father had left him and then deliver the Legacy Conquer ultimatum.

Now Dravenna acted under her direct orders. And more gleamly Sienna — his cousin, the quiet one, the one who barely spoke — was wielding artifacts that seemingly shouldn’t exist in this world, moving in perfect coordination with the Jade Dragoness.

Questions stacked themselves in the back of his mind.

How had Chaos connected with Dravenna? When? Under what razor-thin terms of allegiance or ancient debt that these two were moving as one, the latter taking orders from the former despite?

The Jade Dragoness was supposed to be shattered, leashed to the Heavenchild family through leverage no spy had ever peeled back and no torturer had ever pried loose. Yet here she was, taking orders from an Empress whispered about in shadow, a figure half the world dismissed as myth from Japan despite the truth glaring back at them.

Which master did she truly serve? Or was her much-vaunted brokenness merely the most exquisite cover ever woven — a performance so deep even she believed the lie?

And Sienna. What could the ghost of a girl possibly have contributed?

The girl who hovered at family meals like a wraith, eyes glowing from her screen while she chewed with distracted precision, who flinched anyone who dared to rais their voice and sometimes vanished into libraries for weeks at a time.

Sienna never raised her voice and made eye contact only when forced — and even then it felt like she was looking through you to something farther away.

Cassiopeia hadn’t given him the full details.

He felt it — a hollow where information should be, like a missing molar you keep probing with your tongue.

She was holding something back. Whether under Sienna’s silent command, or because the truth had scorched her throat raw, or because the bond that made her his — thin as silk, strong than any chain — didn’t encompass every shadow in her soul (which was unlikely if not impossible) ... he didn’t know.

And he wouldn’t tear it open.

He could tighten his fingers in her hair right now, drag her gaze up until her neck arched, and demand the rest in a voice low enough to vibrate in her bones. He had the leverage and the right to do it and she’ll happily answer.

But he had always hated rifling through another person’s locked drawers of secrets.

He kept his own too — whispers from Eira, the precise texture of his grief for Melissa, the way his mind folded in on itself during the quiet hours, the system humming beneath his eyes, soul?— or whatever, like a second heartbeat.

Why violate her privacy just because he could? He would either unravel the knot himself — slow, patient, inevitable — or Sienna would lay it bare when the weight of secrecy became heavier than the burden of speech.

And if neither came to pass? Then he would learn to live with the hollow emptiness between them and him than acting all superior and mighty and unroot secrets that weren’t his.

People were entitled to their secrets. Even his slave, and his women. Especially his women and family — because the alternative was a gilded cage around them, and he had spent ten years picking the locks on Maxton’s prison—

Only to rebuild its walls with his own hands? No way!

As for the pattern — Dravenna’s silk-threaded influence, Melissa’s vanished laughter, Chaos’s anticipatory tremors, now Sienna’s silent maneuvering — four women were moving like stars in a constellation (called Phei) only visible in their wake.

Years and distances spanned with invisible hands, shaping events he only felt as aftershocks. Something vast was coalescing beyond his sight, not yet clear, not yet named — but soon.

Soon.

The oak door slid open.

A flight attendant stepped inside — different from Brian’s long-legged, smirking project. Petite, hair severely pinned in a bureaucratic bun, service tray balanced with practiced ease on her palm.

Her smile was already forming — polite, empty she worn for strangers who might complain to corporate.

It died.

It shattered.

Her eyes swept the room in a single horrified arc: the half-empty glass beading with condensation on the side table, the low table shoved violently to the far wall, Phei slumped back in the leather throne with his thighs spread wide and open, and Cassiopeia Maxton — heiress to Main Legacy, raised in silk and vaults, worth more than the GDP of half the continents — sat on the plush carpet between his legs.

Her face was buried against his thigh, her arms locked around his calf like an anchor, his fingers sunk deep into the mass of her hair, guiding its fall.