Phei stood slowly and watched the man kowtow at his feet — because kneeling was the wrong word for it.

Kneeling implied a back still capable of pride...

—What Jonathan Montgomery was doing was older than that. Forehead pressed to the carpet. Palms flat on either side of his head and spine curved into a shape that had nothing to do with anatomy and everything to do with surrender.

Kowtow. Yes, that was the right word.

An it was akin to a kowtow of an emperor’s condemned minister.

A posture a civilisation had developed over two thousand years, really, to express that a body was offering itself wholly to whoever stood above it.

Every being of Jonathan held the bow like his life depended on it — spine locked, shoulders pressed down, forehead grinding into the carpet as though he were afraid Phei might think the angle wasn’t steep enough.

The obedience of his soul were all expressed to his new Master.

Eira drifted closer, floating at Phei’s shoulder, her small form silhouetted against the ruined chandelier light, her expression unreadable in the way she reserved for moments she was deliberately not taking a side.

They watched him together.

Then Eira tilted her head and said, "You realise you’ve just enslaved the father of one of your women."

"I do."

"Have you thought about how she’s going to feel when she finds out?"

Phei’s eyes stayed on Jonathan’s bowed back.

"I did this to save her."

Silence. Eira waited, he continued without turning to look at the fairy.

"Whatever she thinks of me when she learns what I’ve done — beast, monster, something worse than a devil — I’m okay with any of those. I’ll take the names. I’ll add them to my own and carry them alongside the rest. I’ll endure whatever she thinks of me, whatever both of them think of me, if that’s the price of keeping them alive. That’s the price of their freedom I am ready to pay."

He paused.

"Starting today, Roxanne walks through these walls without thinking about how hard the next beating will be. Without rehearsing in the mirror how she’ll explain another bruise to her Sierra. Without sleeping with one eye open because her husband is twenty years of practice at finding places on her body where the marks don’t show. She’s going to live. She’s going to raise Sierra. She’s going to have a life."

His voice softened.

"And he—" a small gesture toward the bowed man "— is going to serve them. Be a husband. Be a father. Be what he failed to be every single day he had a free will to try."

Phei turned.

Walked a few steps away from Jonathan without dismissing him, without granting him permission to rise. The kowtowing man stayed exactly where he was. Forehead down. Palms flat. Breathing shallow.

Eira followed, floating a half-step behind.

"Then, are you going to tell them, Master? Roxanne. Sierra."

"Roxanne, yes." No hesitation. "Sierra, no. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because Sierra isn’t ready to carry that weight." He slid his hands into his pockets. "Knowing her father has been torturing her mother and that he too was tortured him until his mind collapsed — and that I’m the one who collapsed it — then watching him kowtow to me for the rest of his life because of a mark I branded on his soul? She doesn’t need that in her head. Not yet.

"Maybe not ever. That’s a lot of weight for a seventeen-year-old girl to carry about the man who raised her."

Eira shook her head. Slowly. Pointedly.

"Master. With respect. You saved her from being murdered by her own father and the Maxton machinery so a progenitor could crawl into her corpse. If she knew what Jonathan had actually been planning for her — the sacrifice, the ritual, the version of this story where she dies screaming on some altar — she shouldn’t cry about how you handled it. She should thank you. On her knees. Probably while trying to fuck you... not bitching about what method you adviced to save her. That’s what should matter... that she’s arrive and thank you for it."

Phei’s mouth twitched.

"Eira."

"What?"

"I’m not performing here."

Her small wings stilled.

"I’m not doing any of this for points. I’m not doing it to be praised. I’m not doing it so my women can line up and thank me for being such a ’noble boy’ protecting them from all the ’big bad men’." He turned his head slightly to look at her.

"I’m doing it because if I don’t, the people I love die. That’s the whole equation. No applause required. No gratitude expected. Sierra doesn’t need to know what her father was planning so she can admire me more. She needs to not know so she can sleep at night."

"Yes. But if she knows what—"

"Sierra won’t know. And she shouldn’t know yet what Jonathan was doing to her mother and—"

"You’re robbing her of the right to know. You’re hiding the truth from her."

"No."

Phei’s voice was quiet. Patient. The quiet he only used when he was refusing something and didn’t want to have to refuse it twice.

"I’m not hiding it. It’s just not the right time yet. There’s a difference between keeping a secret and choosing the moment. Right now, we’re focused on pulling the other girls out of the same set of jaws that was about to close on Sierra. Priya. Natasha. Juliette. The twins.

"Whoever else the Maxtons have on their list. Those are the fires we’re putting out this week. When the ashes are cold, then we sit Sierra down and we tell her everything. Every word. When she’s ready for it."

He let that sit.

"Until then, her father is alive. She gets to believe that. She gets to have a version of him she can still love."

Eira laughed softly.

"Heroic, I see."

"When it benefits me." Phei shrugged. "Can’t sit around watching beauties get butchered for the convenience of some men I do not give a shit about. Those, some of them, if not all, are my future harem members, Eira. No way they’re dying on my watch."

"So what’s the plan, then? Now that Jonathan has—" She gestured vaguely at the kowtowing figure. "—become what he is. Are you going to confront the other patriarchs? March into the Heavenchild estate, the Maxton Mansion, announce yourself and—"

"No."

He shook his head once.

"Everything stays exactly the way it was. Jonathan continues playing his part. Same meetings. Same agreements. Same dinners with Harold and Elliot. Same conspiratorial little smiles over Scotch. From the outside, nothing changes. From the inside —"

He smiled.

"— I have an ear in every one of those rooms."

Eira’s wings fluttered once.

"If the families get wind that one of their core conspirators has flipped, who knows what contingency plans they spin up? Backup sacrifices? Alternative timelines? Rituals they’ve kept in their back pocket in case someone got cold feet.

"I’m not giving them the chance to pivot. Jonathan stays in character. He tells me everything that happens in those rooms — every word, every decision, every whisper Harold makes about Sierra that nobody else is supposed to hear. We let them plan. We let them think they’re winning.

"And the whole time I’m three moves ahead because I’m reading their script while they’re still writing it."