Phei let the car idle for a long moment outside Maxton Mansion, engine a low predatory purr. The wrought-iron gate stared back—empty, shadowed, the kind of stillness that felt like a held breath. Windows dark. Grounds silent. No gardeners, no staff, no flicker of life behind the glass. Just stone and ghosts and the faint echo of whatever cataclysm had emptied the place in a single night.

"So, this is abandoned, huh?" he muttered, lips curling.

Eira, crystalline and half-there in the passenger seat, gave a single nod. "They got what they wanted. The house is compromised. Ancestral estate would make more sense than patching bullet holes and pride."

He shook his head once—sharp—and eased the car forward again.

Just a few seconds — the Castellano mansion was right across, unlike other Paradise estates that sprawled acres apart.

The Maxtons and Castellanos had always been neighbors.

Close enough that they must have felt the full brunt of his wrath when he attacked Harold. Close enough that the explosion of power that night probably and the shockwave must have rattled their crystal chandeliers and make their mansion shake, cracked a few wine glasses, sent every guard dog into hysterics.

Neighbors in the biblical sense: close enough to feel the wrath in their bones.

He parked in the blind spot where the camera arcs never quite overlapped, but hadn’t killed the engine, and stayed there the late-afternoon hush.

But the hush didn’t last.

He was done playing human today.

He sat there, contemplating.

Amber was waiting.

He’d promised to pick her up.

Lately, he’d become exposed to the thrill of sneaking daughters out had become his favorite new hobby for Phei... the calculation, the risk, the quiet spite of slipping past fathers who thought they still owned the keys to their girls’ bedrooms.

All he and she knew was that it couldn’t be direct — couldn’t be walking up to the front door and asking her parents for permission like some polite suitor. Her father, who had been home for more than a week now instead of his usual business trips, would turn him down before he finished the sentence. And Phei knew, just like him, that Amber liked sneaking out without anyone noticing.

There won’t be "Good afternoon, sir. I have come to pick Amber up." Her father would turn him down before he finished the sentence or—he would have ended that sentence with a bullet or a phone call to people who carried worse.

And Phei knew, just like him, that Amber liked sneaking out without anyone noticing.

And also, it was better this way... to just sneak her out. As for Amber — apart from her bedroom kinks and fetishes, she liked being rebellious.

And the first step in a teenage girl’s rebellious phase was sneaking out.

And because the real Amber lived for the rebellion the way some people needed oxygen and Phei who had had developed a taste for stealing daughters from beneath their fathers’ noses after taking Delilah, Victoria and Sienna (although it was after beating the bastard) and now Sierra, couldn’t have it any other way.

It was like tasting the forbidden... the geometry of it. The risk. The slow, vicious pleasure of taking what belonged to men who believed they owned everything—while those same men slept/sat, smug and oblivious, three floors above.

Today he wanted it spiteful. Proper. Theatrical.

It was just that this time, the sneaking out required her to be away for days.

Overdoing it, maybe.

But where was the fun in modest?

He started the car again, reversed until he reached the blind corner where the perimeter cameras swept useless arcs. Parked. Stepped out. Pressed his back to the cold stone directly beneath the nearest camera housing, body already syncing to the rhythm of the lens.

Every time the lens rotated, he moved with it — staying in its shadow, riding its blind spot like a ghost the system couldn’t acknowledge.

The truth was, even if the cameras tried to catch him, they wouldn’t.

The awakening had come with Void-Ice, yes. But it had also tripled his physical stats. Strength. Speed. Reflexes. Everything was sharper, faster, more dangerous than any human body had a right to be.

Even if the cameras had caught him dead-center (which they didn’t), the footage would have shown nothing human just a small blur. His stats were x3 of what he had before the awakening after the Molting.

Strength that could bend battleship plating, speed that made bullets look lazy, reflexes so sharp the world seemed to stutter in deference.

He repeated.

Shift. Freeze. Shift.

He rode the blind spot like a shadow stitched to the night itself.

The camera rotated away then.

Phei exploded in speed.

The Castellano wall stretched high and imposing, but on the inside, trees had been planted along its entire length—old oaks and elms whose branches reached toward the iron spikes crowning the barrier. Cover. Handholds raised for decades—branches thick as thighs stretching toward the barrier like a living scaffold meant to foil intruders.

It was never going to foil him.

His feet devoured the distance in a heartbeat.

The wall surged toward him like a living thing desperate to stop the inevitable. Phei dropped into a low, predatory crouch mid-sprint without breaking stride, every muscle in his powerful legs coiling like steel cables wound to the breaking point. The ground trembled faintly beneath the raw force gathering in his thighs and calves.

Then he exploded upward.

The launch was violent, perfect, inhuman.

His body left the earth with such explosive power that the pavement beneath his takeoff point cracked in a spiderweb pattern, shards of concrete kicking up behind him like shrapnel from a detonation.

One step.

His foot planted on nothing — on empty air, on the void itself — and found purchase as if gravity had personally submitted to him. The second step followed instantly, higher, faster, climbing an invisible staircase that physics had never been consulted about and would never approve of.

Each stride upward defied every law of motion, his momentum carrying him in a smooth, impossible arc that made the afternoon air itself seem to part in reverence and fear.

At the apex, with the razor-sharp iron spikes of the wall crown glinting hungrily just inches below his chest, Phei twisted.