As the elevator sealed Phei and Maya inside its metallic sovereignty, the world outside narrowed into silence, polished walls, soft golden lighting and the faint upward pull of movement. The doors had closed with a hush too elegant to be called mechanical, trapping them together in a private little chamber of mirrored steel and quiet tension.

Maya stood beside him with her hand curled around his arm, her softness leaning into him as naturally as moonlight leaning across water, and Phei, despite all the warmth of her presence, found himself uncertain where to place the question clawing at the back of his throat.

He was curious.

More than curious.

Something had happened to Maya. Something had happened around Maya, reached into his soul, Maddie’s memory, Eira’s perception and everyone’s awareness, and carved her presence out so cleanly that only a hollow ache had remained. He could not stop thinking about it.

He could not stop remembering the moment Mother spoke her name and the veil split open inside him like rotten silk beneath a blade.

Maya Scarlett.

A name that should have never been absent from him and presence he should have never forgotten.

And yet, looking at her now, Phei could not find the shape of accusation.

How could he?

Maya stood there with her silver hair resting over her shoulders, her eyes soft, her mouth carrying that gentle smile which made even silence feel less cruel. She looked like serenity given human form, like some delicate moon spirit who had wandered into the wrong elevator and chosen affection over escape.

How could that smile have anything to do with mind manipulation? Soul interference? Memory erasure? No. Never.

’Right?’

The word itself tasted ridiculous.

There was no world, no timeline, no possible insult to logic in which Phei Ryujin Tiamat simply forgot Maya for hours. Not for a minute, for a breath. Not when she had become one of the quiet rhythms inside him, one of those people whose absence should have screamed louder than any alarm.

Yet he had forgotten and the rest of his women had forgotten.

Eira had forgotten, and that one chilled him most of all, because making Eira forget someone was not like distracting a housemaid with gossip.

That was sorcery with ambition and terrifying power touching places power should have needed a formal apology to enter.

Yesterday, after they had left the airport, Phei had failed to ask Maya anything. Even when they had gathered around Mother’s bed, or even when the warmth of reunion softened the night, and Maya eventually retired to her room, he had chosen not to follow her.

Some days, Phei could not help his curiosity and some questions grabbed his neck and dragged him straight through doors better left closed.

And this was no small thing or his missing book or misplaced key or another suspicious legacy family behaving like villainy had dental benefits.

This was Maya.

But Eira had advised patience.

"Let it run its course."

Maya was not someone who could hide something from him forever. Not truly for long.

She would eventually tell him, not because he forced her, not because he trapped her beneath suspicion, but because whatever stood between them had always been more tender than secrecy and more stubborn than fear.

So Phei kept quiet.

For now.

The elevator continued rising, smooth and soundless, its soft lights catching in Maya’s hair. She hugged his arm a little closer and tilted her face up toward him, her expression peacefully curious, as if she could feel the question in him and had decided not to touch it yet either.

"What is up today?" she asked softly.

Phei looked at her.

For a second, all his doubts paused beneath the quiet sincerity of her voice.

She was here, present, warm, real and hugging his arm as if the world had not dared to erase her from him for hours.

And because of that, because of the sheer impossible sweetness of her standing beside him after the horror of forgetting, Phei only smiled faintly and placed his free hand over hers.

"Errands," he said. "A few dangerous ones, probably. Knowing this island, maybe three stupid ones disguised as important ones."

Maya blinked. "That sounds poorly organized."

"It is my life."

"That explains much."

He laughed under his breath, and the elevator carried them upward.

At the same time, while her Master rode through the hotel’s inner spine, Eira floated high above Infinity Chaos Hotel, where the tower pierced the morning like a black-gold spear and the world below spread itself out in impossible grandeur.

In the past days, the high tower had become their base of activity and their nest above conspiracies, wealth, women, legacy madness and whatever fresh disaster had woken up hungry.

From up here, the wind did not blow but attacked in sharp gusts that came slicing across the rooftop with murderous enthusiasm, dragging the warmth from the morning sun and sharpening it into something that could have peeled ordinary skin from bone.

The rising sun and the wind had become willing accomplices, one gilding the world, the other trying to throw everyone off it.

Eira hovered in the air with her little body angled lazily against the storm, silver-void glacial hair fluttering around her while her eyes swept across Hell’s Paradise Island.

She still could not understand why the rooftop of Infinity Chaos Hotel was never peaceful.

Sovereign Tower had its own terrifying altitude, yes, but even that place held a certain controlled majesty, as if the building understood rich people liked to stand high above the world without immediately being converted into flying debris.

Infinity Chaos Hotel, on the other hand, seemed deliberately hostile.

The rooftop felt like a place designed by someone who looked at comfort, revenue and safety regulations and said, How tedious. Let the wealthy suffer artistically.

’Is it part of the Empress’s plan?’

Had she deliberately refused to make money from rooftop events just to spite architecture itself?

Eira knew for sure that if this hotel asked a million for a twenty-four-hour event up here, the disgustingly rich would pay. Gladly. They would stand in tailored coats, drink impossible wine, take photographs against the skyline.

Humans with money were adorable that way:

Offer them comfort at the correct height and they called it luxury.

And who could blame them?

Below, Hell’s Paradise Lake stretched like a vast dark mirror touched by morning gold, its surface too ancient and too arrogant to sparkle prettily for anyone’s amusement. From it, Hell’s Paradise River snaked away in a long sovereign curve, slipping out from the lake before disappearing into distant oblivion, only to reappear far away in Paradise and return once more to its source like a celestial serpent that had decided geography was a suggestion.

Around both lay the endless forest, dense, green-black and old, its canopy rolling over the island like the back of some sleeping beast too proud to admit it was asleep.

Lake, river and forest existed in harmony, yet each carried a distinct infinity. Each seemed to look at the others with ancient pride, as if engaged in a silent war over who had been here first and who would remain after all these glittering towers, legacy families and pretty little human catastrophes became dust.

From this murderous perch the whole island lay surrendered beneath them, close enough to covet and far enough to forgive, the way only an obscene altitude allowed a thing to be both.

The morning had spilled itself across creation in long ribbons of molten gold and bruised rose, and where that light struck the lake it did not glitter so much as smoulder, a slow furnace burning just beneath a skin of black glass.

Mist still clung in the low valleys like the island had not finished dreaming, pooling silver between the hills, draping the forest’s farthest reaches in a soft drowned haze that made the distant trees look less like trees and more like the memory of them.

Far out, where the river bent toward Paradise, the towers of lesser districts caught the dawn and threw it back in scattered fragments, a thousand small fires burning cold and bright against the retreating dark.

It was the sort of view that made mortals believe in something.

It was the sort of view that had, no doubt, sold a great many overpriced rooftop evenings to people too dazzled to notice the wind was quietly itemising which of them it intended to murder first.

Sharp winds howled above them all.

Who could miss this view because of a few million dollars?

Eira clasped her hands behind her back like she was some wise sage and smiled.

"What a beauty, nature is." she turned to her side. "What do you think?"

In the morning sun, Selene’s figure looked like a wraith carved from the place where light went to die.

She stood at the rooftop’s edge without trembling beneath the violent wind, hair moving in slow strands around her face, her form wrapped in darkness so dense and elegant that the sunlight did not touch her so much as negotiate with her presence and lose.

The gold and yellow rays poured across the rooftop, across the glass, across the stone and steel, but when they reached Selene, the shadows around her drank the sun and all arrogant brilliant gold rays greedily and offered nothing back.