During the first survey, while Phei had still been busy with the shoot and the first quarter of the interview was only beginning to sharpen its teeth, Eira had not been idle. She had swept through everything she could reach about the Legacy Families, peeling through their histories, their hidden movements, their old alliances, their stains, private sins, pretty lies, and the ugly little corners they had dressed in noble curtains.

Unless the secret stood guarded by an artifact beyond the rank of her perception, chained beneath a bloodline seal, veiled by divine obstruction, hidden behind whatever other ruinously expensive nonsense the great legacy families had spent generations inventing to keep the world out, she could see it.

Unfortunately, there were many such protections, because the Legacy Families were not simple, and anyone who thought they were had probably mistaken old monsters for rich people with better clothes.

Still, Eira had discovered a lot.

Too much, really.

Enough that if she had possessed a proper office, she would have needed a whole wall, several red strings and perhaps a bottle of something illegal just to keep the conspiracy pretty.

Among those discoveries was The Coffer.

Not a safe like some rich person’s silly treasure room filled with gold bars for insecure billionaires to stroke while pretending they were dragons.

No, The Coffer was older, stranger and far more dangerous:

It was a collective treasury belonging to all the Legacy Families, created when they had first arrived on this little rock called Earth, back when their exile still tasted fresh, humiliation still burned, and unity had been less of a virtue and more of a survival instinct.

The Legacy Families did not all see eye to eye, not even close.

Half of them could barely remain in the same alliance without smiling like poisoned knives at one another. But when it came to the Coffer, they had been united, or at least united enough to keep pretending.

That alone told Eira how important the Coffer was:

Families that hated one another did not build shared treasure hoards unless the alternative was worse.

It was one of the things that had made the Heavenchilds, after their world influence, the undisputed leaders of the Legacy Families.

They were the keepers, guardians and the beautifully perfumed accountants of a hoard in the Coffer so obscene it probably made greed feel under-qualified.

Each decade, the families gathered to check what had been added to the Coffer and EACH year, every family paid a certain amount into it, a tax of sorts, though none of them would have called it that aloud because rich people hated taxes until they were the ones collecting them.

The Heavenchilds received those yearly allocations from these families and converted them into treasures: diamonds, gold, platinum, rare stones, old-world metals, spiritual gems, mineral cores and materials that had come from the World of Power rather than Earth’s boring little shelves of geology.

The reason behind this annual contribution was hidden so deeply that even Eira had not managed to uncover it yet, and that annoyed her immensely.

"Very rude," she had muttered to herself when the truth refused to open. "If you are going to hide a centuries-old treasure conspiracy, at least leave footnotes for the hardworking fairy."

But no. Nothing. No clear motive, open agreement and no honest statement written in a dusty old record saying, yes, we are putting ungodly amounts of wealth here because of this ancient terror waiting under the bed.

The truth sat behind layers too old and too deliberate to break casually.

For now, Eira only knew the families paid into the Coffer for a reason important enough to survive centuries, exile, pride, hatred and all the ridiculous politics of legacy bloodlines.

And that last part was the part that itched:

Eira had lived long enough to know that frightened things hoarded, and that the size of a hoard told you the size of the fear behind it. Families that despised one another did not spend centuries feeding the same jar for fun, or for a rainy decade, or because accountants enjoyed the exercise.

They fed it because something, somewhere, in the dark behind their exile, had taught all of them the same lesson at the same time, and that lesson had been frightening enough to outvote their hatred of each other.

Eira did not know what it was:

She knew only that whatever the Coffer was truly for, it had nothing to do with being rich, and that the day she finally cracked that particular seal, she was probably going to wish she hadn’t.

So what did that unimaginable hoard have to do with tonight, with Eira’s surveillance, and with the Maxtons dragging out their hidden Chained?

Simple.

’The alliance is dying.’

Yet not in a so way dramatically like one clean explosion; history rarely had the decency to collapse neatly.

The alliance had been rotting for years, cracking day by day since eleven years ago, when the Ashfords became the first to truly break away and denounce the Heavenchilds’ superiority.

That act had not merely bruised Heavenchild pride but it had struck the old structure at its spine.

Since then, the alliance between the Legacy Families had been falling apart slowly, with every passing year loosening another nail, every hidden resentment sharpening, every old family beginning to remember that being led and being ruled were not the same thing.

This year, however, was different.

This year the fracture had turned catastrophic.

The Destined Day was crouching closer.

And all the families were preparing to break free from the alliance they had forged since the day they were banished and imprisoned on this little rock. They still paid what was expected of them, because old systems did not collapse until the final moment and cowards loved pretending all was well until the roof sat on their heads.

But the end was near:

...Once the families broke away, one of the first things they would demand was obvious.

’Their share of the Coffer.’

The treasures they had entrusted to the Heavenchilds for centuries.

The wealth they had poured into that collective hoard year after year, decade after decade, while the Angels smiled beautifully and called themselves guardians.