Phei’s gaze returned to her.

And Adriana felt it... his presence.

The room seemed to acknowledge him around her. The air carried him — warm now where it had been cold, thick with the faint scent of ozone and something darker, cleaner, almost metallic. The cold from the portal had faded to a restrained edge, but something warmer, deeper and far more dangerous remained in the space where he stood.

Something inside her had already been shamefully aware of him long before this moment, because some private corner of her had watched him grow into beauty and power through screens and interviews and whispered memories, that presence found the hidden place and opened the door.

Her thoughts betrayed her with memory and the sudden, brutal awareness that Phei was no longer the neglected boy she remembered from the old neighborhood or the Charity Case standing too quietly near people who thought themselves above him.

He looked like an immortal in her wild mind she had created from years of no sex and satisfaction, and even that imagination felt underfunded.

Her lack of creativity had never forged anything close to the man standing before her now.

’Hot. That is too small. Beautiful. Also too small. Dangerous. Closer: Alive in a way that makes the room seem less vivid beside him.’

Phei watched her for a brief second longer.

He had spent enough time with this new dominance inside him to understand patterns. It did not touch his women because it did not need to. But with others, especially those already carrying desire for him like a secret fever, his presence worked differently.

It did not create hunger from nothing and instead revealed hunger already starving in the dark.

Adriana’s body betrayed too much.

The quick, shallow breath that caught in her throat. The pulse she could feel hammering at the side of her neck. The way her skin tightened and he could see how her nipples tightening against the fabric of her blouse as if the air itself had turned against her.

The low shameful heat that has bloomed between her thighs, sudden and wet was unmistakable he could smell the scent of her own arousal was rising beneath shock and embarrassment — sharp, warm, intimate — unmistakable to senses that had become brutally unfair.

’How starved is that woman that she’s already wet without me doing much of anything?’ Phei couldn’t help but wonder but hid his reaction behind a slow smile, because if he let every truth his body could read appear on his face, polite society would collapse within the hour.

Not that polite society had been doing a stellar job anyway.

’Ah, Patriarch Castellano, you irresponsible man~’ He was thankful, not at all complaining.

Melissa had once told him about Adriana and Amber her daughter had too.

The Hot rude neighbor as beautiful a woman she is was actually neglected but also proud and starving in a life where no one worthy for her to break her marriage vows. More than a decade without the warmth of a man who knew how to make a woman feel seen rather than stored.

At the time, Phei had listened; now, standing in front of her smelling the scent of her cunt, he believed every word.

Adriana was not merely attracted:

’She is famished.’

Phei stepped away from Melissa and Roxanne, though his fingers brushed their waists once before letting go. He crossed the room toward Adriana with calm confidence, and every step as he grew closer his dominance pressing on her, made her spine straighten as if she were preparing for an argument she had already lost.

She was seated near the sofa, one hand still half-held gripping her thigh until Phei arrived.

He stopped before her.

Adriana looked up:

The closer he stood, the worse the cameras became in memory. They had failed insultingly. They had flattened him into beauty and missed the heat, the gravity, the faint cruelty of his soft smile, the absurd elegance of a boy who had walked through an impossible portal and now looked at her as if he remembered the beauty she had once been too proud to explain.

Phei reached for her hand.

She should have pulled away.

She did not.

His fingers closed around hers, warm and steady. Then he bowed his head and kissed the back of her hand; Adriana stopped breathing.

Melissa and Roxanne looked at each other.

Oh.

So that was the direction he had chosen.

Men. Honestly. Give them divine power, impossible beauty and a room with one neglected woman, and suddenly they started composing social disasters with their mouths.

Phei lifted his face but did not release Adriana’s hand.

His Hunger Touch when he touched her confirmed what his eyes had already begun to suspect.

’Starved! Worry not mother-in-law, I am here for your liberation.’

"What are you doing?" Adriana asked, except her voice came softer than intended, which was personally offensive to her dignity.

"Greeting you properly," Phei said.

"You greeted the others with kisses too. I see, that might be an habit."

"No, they’e mine, that would explain the kisses on lips not hand."

The words struck harder than they should have.

Adriana’s fingers tightened involuntarily in his; he hadn’t let go and Phei smiled as if he had noticed but would not humiliate her for it. Worse. Mercy could be so rude.

"It has been a while," he said. "But you are still as beautiful as I remember."

Adriana’s lips parted, ready to deflect.

Phei did not give her time.

"No, sorry" he added, gaze moving over her face with open admiration softened by deliberate respect. "That is wrong. You are even more beautiful than I last saw you. I remember you as the very very hot neighbor who acted like smiling cost money. But now?"

Her cheeks warmed at not so complement remark.

Phei tilted his head slightly. "Now you look like a woman time tried to age and somehow ended up flattering instead. You have that dangerous kind of beauty, Ms. Adriana. The kind that makes people think you are younger at first, then closer, they realize no... that is not youth. That is a woman who has lived, endured, sharpened, and somehow become more tempting because of it."

Adriana stared at him, Roxanne blinked while Melissa’s brows rose before she rolled her eyes.

The compliment was absurd but worse, it was working.

Of course it was working. Adriana had been starving for someone worthy to see her for what she was; see the years of neglect had made her proud in the way hungry people learned to become proud around locked kitchens. Now Phei was standing before her, holding her hand like it was normal, praising not the illusion of youth but the nurtured and hot dangers of her maturity had made her.

That was not a compliment; more as a siege.

A very unfair siege.

"Oh, by the way I saw someone with Amber a few days ago at the Romano restaurant," Phei continued, eyes glinting. "I think she your little sister; you two look alike."

Adriana blinked. "Which little sister?"

"The woman with Amber. She looked like you. Similar face, similar elegance. I assumed she had to be your little sister or something."

"That..." Adriana swallowed. "That was me."

Phei’s expression shifted into perfect surprise.

Melissa’s mouth twitched.

Roxanne looked away because if she smiled too obviously, Adriana might attack her with a cushion and righteous shame.

Phei bowed his head slightly. "Then forgive my rudeness."

Adriana stared.

"I mistook you for a younger woman related to yourself," he said. "A failure of perception. Clearly my mistake but gods..."

"You are impossible," Adriana whispered.

"Frequently."

"You cannot say things like that."

"I just did."

"You should not."

"Ah. Different issue."

Her free hand rose to cover part of her flushed face.

Phei still did not let go of the other.

...And gods help him, he had no intention of letting go yet.

The sight of her trying to hide her reaction stirred something wicked and tender in him at once.

Adriana had too much pride to melt easily, but starvation made even pride tremble when warmth finally arrived. She wanted to pull her hand back because keeping it there admitted too much and wanted him to keep holding it because letting go would feel like another small abandonment, and apparently Phei had become fluent in reading emotional contradictions from women with beautiful faces and terrible coping habits.

Melissa watched him carefully.

Roxanne did too.

They both understood more than Adriana knew; the exact shape of the hunger, the hidden years and the full depth of what a neglected woman might feel when someone that attractive and charming and beautiful like Phei suddenly treated her as if she were not invisible.

Adriana lowered her hand just enough to look at him. "You have become very bold."

Phei smiled. "You have become more beautiful too; growth apparently hasn’t left us the same."

"That is not an answer."

"Isn’t it is a better sentence?"

"You always talked like this?"

"No. I had to grow into my crimes."

Roxanne made a sound that might have been a cough.

Melissa’s eyes softened, though there was mischief there too.

Adriana tried to gather herself, but Phei’s thumb brushed lightly over the back of her hand, and the tiny motion scattered half her collected dignity across the floor. There should have been laws against boys like him. Strict ones and enforced by humorless women with iron discipline and no neglected marriages.

Phei’s gaze sharpened, but his voice lowered.

"Ms. Adriana."

The room seemed to lean in, Adriana’s breathing changed.

"Yes?"