Before he left, Phei turned to Elena Ashford who had been quiet since Maya returned.

Too quiet.

She looked composed. Posture elegant, face calm, hands folded like a woman at peace with the world:

Inside her skull: a war room.

Maps on every wall. Names pinned across them and pieces moving while she smiled pleasantly at a room full of rivals, every one of them due to be handled.

Because Maya Scarlett was not simple as Elena has thought she’d be as one of the contenders of the Queen Throne — and Phei the way held her like she was the only fixed point in his spinning world.

Elena had catalogued exactly one Maya Scarlett before this morning: sweet, rambling, harmless.

Wrong.

Catastrophically wrong.

Maddie — chaos. Open field. Fightable. Loud enemies were manageable enemies.

Melissa — a pillar. One did not fight a load-bearing wall. One learned to live in the room it held up.

Sienna — theology. Burial rites. A professional with hazard pay and no dependents.

Maya —

Nothing.

Her mind arrived at Maya and found nothing to write. No angle. No lever. No ambition to counter.

The girl wanted nothing, threatened no one, and had become necessary to everyone before a single door was heard opening.

How did one out-maneuver a woman with no strategy?

’Perhaps by acquiring a mysterious mansion of my own. The Ashfords have property. Surely one estate could be persuaded to develop an aura.’

Stop.

Elena stopped the thought like a passenger catching herself arguing aloud on public transport.

’Darling. You are sitting in a beautiful room, being handed everything, planning a real estate campaign against a girl whose crime is being nice.’

One breath.

Ambition without adaptation was ego in expensive shoes. Fine. She could adapt. Adaptation was the one Ashford virtue nobody had needed to teach her.

But under the maps and pins sat the thing she had been carefully not looking at, and it refused to be pinned anywhere: she was tired.

She had spent so long believing love was territory that she had forgotten it might be a place to sit down, and today she had looked around a room full of women loved by the same man and felt — for one horrifying second — not challenged but afraid of being left outside.

Which was absurd. Elena did not get left outside; all she knew was how to own the building, the door, and usually the locksmith.

The fear stayed anyway.

"Elena."

She looked up, and her eyes went to him with a hunger she caught a fraction too late. Then the smile arrived, beautiful and controlled, because pride was a stubborn disease and Elena had a refined case of it.

"You are leaving?"

"Only for an errand."

"With you, errands tend to become incidents."

"Slander."

"Slander with supporting evidence."

He held out his hand, and she looked at it the way a diplomat looks at a treaty with one clause she has not read. Taking a man’s hand in front of eleven observant women was not a gesture — it was a statement, and it would be noticed, filed, cross-referenced, and legislated by Maddie before dinner. Her strategy department drafted three objections in half a second.

Her fingers slipped into his anyway.

Traitors, the lot of them, and not even expensive ones.

They noticed, of course but nobody said a word — even Maddie held her peace, which was frankly the most alarming event of the afternoon.

The balcony doors sighed open onto cool air, lake water, the green breath of the forest below. Elena stepped out and looked down at the world.

From up here, Hell’s Paradise Island was a toy — towers like glass teeth, the whole glittering machine of families and bloodlines reduced to rooftops she could cover with her thumb. It should have made ambition feel enormous.

It made her feel more tired.

Phei sat on the wide seat and drew her down in front of him. She stiffened — surprise, not refusal — as his arms folded her back against his chest, and she ran the standard classification and came up empty.

It was not possessive but comfortable, and comfortable had no counter in any playbook she owned. Her hands gripped his forearms the way they had throughout every private moment she refused to name — tight, immediate, before she could instruct them otherwise.

The staff mutiny was becoming general.

His thumb traced slow circles over the back of her hand while she stared hard at the city, refusing on principle to look at her reflection in the glass railing, where her eyes had gone unforgivably bright.

"You are thinking too much," he said.

"Rich, coming from you."

"I think only when forced."

"That is not true."

"It sounded humble."

"It sounded stupid."

He laughed against her hair. "You can still insult me. Good. You are not too far gone."

Her breath came out unsteady, and his arms tightened as if he had heard the wobble in it and decided to hold the structure up himself.

"Maya is not simple I see" she said.

"No. Surprised."

"She is dangerous."

"Yes."

"You admit it so easily."

"I have eyes."

"And still you hold her like that and I do not think you know anything about her."

"I hold you too."

Her fingers tightened on his arm —

"Elena."

She did not answer, so he turned one hand and touched her face, guiding her into his palm before her strategy department could file the objection it was frantically drafting. Her eyes closed, and one gesture took more armor off her than a kiss would have. It was not dramatic, a throne, or a promise made before witnesses...

...It was peace, and peace, it turned out, was absolutely devastating.

"You do not have to make this a war," he said, and her eyes opened. "This room. Those girls. The noise, the teasing, the way Maddie turns every conversation into a crime scene with better perfume — it is not a battlefield. It is home, Elena, and you’re part of it as long as you choose to."

Her lips parted. Nothing came out.

"You look at everyone like pieces on a board," he went on. "Maddie. Melissa. Sienna. Maya. Already calculating what you must become so nobody can push you out; so that you be on top." Her fingers curled into his sleeve. "So, I am telling you: relax. Enjoy it. The food, the noise, the warmth from everyone— they will annoy you and drag you into things you never agreed to. Sit here without sharpening every breath into strategy."

She looked down at his arms around her waist. Too steady, too certain, far too easy to believe in —

"What if I cannot?" she whispered.

"Then I will remind you."

"That simple?"

"No." She heard the smile. "You are complicated. I am not suicidal enough to call it simple."

A laugh escaped her — small, cracked at the edges, entirely genuine — and he kissed the side of her head.

"You have a place here. Stop exhausting yourself trying to conquer what we’re already giving you."

The proud woman in his arms went completely still. Then, slowly, with the grace of a monarch she leaned back into him — not much, but enough. It was the surrender nobody inside would have noticed, and he felt it through his whole chest: the spine softening, the hands unclenching, the breath dropping from war-rhythm into the slower one of a woman being held.

Home. The word landed like a gift with a bomb in it.

She had wanted a throne because thrones could not be ignored, a position because positions could be defended, first because first sounded like safe. And here he was, holding her above a small shining city, telling her she did not have to fight for warmth.

It ached in a way that felt suspiciously like relief.

"You make it sound easy," she said.

"I know it is not."

"Then why say it like that?"

"Because someone should."

She turned her face enough to see him from the corner of her eye. He was not teasing, was not judging, nether was he asking her to be less sharp, less ambitious, less Elena — only asking her to rest, which was somehow the more outrageous request. Her hand gathered a small fold of his shirt, not clutching this time. Holding. Because... she wanted to feel him there.

"I do not know how to stop planning."

"Then plan to relax."

"That is ridiculous."

"It suits this family."

Another laugh, and this one arrived whole.

He kissed her cheek, her temple, then rested his face near hers while they looked down at the distant city together. Behind the glass came voices, laughter, women settling into an afternoon. For once, Elena did not calculate what the moment meant. She let herself be held — only a little while, only enough to breathe. Enough mattered.

When he finally shifted, her fingers tightened once in his shirt before letting go. He noticed.

"I will come back," he said.

She looked at him fully, and what showed in her face was brief but real. "Be careful."

"I will."

Her eyes narrowed. "Nobody believes you when you say that."

"Unfortunate."

"Experience."

He kissed her once — soft, brief — and helped her up. Before they went in, his thumb brushed her cheek one last time, sealing the reassurance there like wax on a letter.

"Home," he reminded her.

She nodded. Not convinced or free of plans — she had already resumed three of them on the walk to the door and would deny it under oath. But softer.

It was a door opening by a crack in a palace built entirely for war.

Phei stepped into his bedroom and the door cut off the warmth, the perfume, the weight of watching eyes. One breath alone in the quiet. Then he lifted his hand.

Snap.

The portal split the room, dark-edged light folding space inward with a hum that made the air tremble. On the other side waited another thread of his life, another woman whose absence had pressed on him all morning.

Melissa.

’Time to bring her home.’

He stepped through.

Little did the Young Dragon know what waited on the other side.