Eira stared at him for a beat.

Then, softly: "That’s deliciously cruel, Master."

"I learned from a good fairy."

He turned back to Jonathan.

"Come here."

The man did not rise.

He crawled.

Forehead still low, hands still spread, Jonathan Montgomery dragged himself forward across the ruined carpet on his elbows and knees — a slow, painful scrape over broken crystal and drying piss, each inch costing him something no account could measure.

He arrived at Phei’s feet. Pressed his forehead to the leather of Phei’s shoe. Held it there.

Phei looked down at him without expression.

"Eira. Heal him more than he already is, back to the way he was before any of this started."

"The original Jonathan? Pre-beating, pre-torture, pre-breakfast-shouting-at-Roxanne? That Jonathan?"

"That one and only. Every detail. He needs to walk into his next meeting looking exactly like the man they expect."

Eira drifted down, small hands already beginning to glow with that soft warm light that had been doing Jonathan’s maintenance for the last several hours.

She began her work at his scalp and moved downward.

Phei crouched again. Not close. Just close enough that Jonathan could hear him.

"Listen carefully."

Jonathan did not move. Did not need to, as every cell of the man was already listening.

"First. The money. Don’t put it in Roxanne’s name directly — that would trigger every Maxton auditor on retainer within forty-eight hours. I want a trust. Two of them, actually. One operational, one dormant. Roxanne is the controlling trustee of both, but the ownership structure should look like it belongs to a firm offshore — pick a jurisdiction with opacity rules you’ve already used before, somewhere a Montgomery grandchild would plausibly hold generational wealth. Sierra is the named beneficiary.

"Roxanne is the mechanism. Everything pays out through corporate layers so nothing on the surface looks like you handed your wife your empire."

"As you command, Master."

"Staged over ninety days. Small transfers first, nothing that trips a threshold. Then larger moves disguised as restructuring, acquisitions, portfolio rebalancing. Use the same excuses you’ve used to move money around the firm for the last twenty years.

"By the time anyone notices the centre of gravity has shifted, the structure is already complete and legally bulletproof. If you die tomorrow — or if the Montgomery family tries to contest anything — that trust survives. They touch nothing. Sierra inherits everything through Roxanne, with no legal seam they can prise open."

"As you command, Master."

"Second. The prenup. Rewrite it. Today. Or technically — have your own most trusted associate redraft it tonight and backdate it to look like a routine update from two years ago. Close every loophole the Montgomery family could use to challenge Roxanne’s position if something happens to you.

"Make her legally untouchable by your own bloodline. I don’t care what excuses you dress it up in — estate planning, tax optimisation, post-cancer reflection, whatever. It gets done this week."

"As you command, Master."

"Third."

Phei’s voice dropped slightly.

"The files." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Jonathan’s forehead, pressed to the leather of Phei’s shoe, did not lift — but Phei felt the small, almost imperceptible change in his breathing. The subtle stiffening that told him he’d just named the thing the older man had kept buried deepest.

"Every judge you own. Every senator and congress politician on your retainer. Every piece of leverage you’ve collected over twenty years of running the most powerful legal firm in America. Every recording, every photograph, every affidavit, every one of the quiet little insurance policies you keep in that vault nobody’s supposed to know about.

"All of it. Copies — not originals, copies — transferred to a location I will specify. Within seventy-two hours."

"As you command, Master."

"The originals stay where they are. The world still believes Jonathan Montgomery is holding the knife. But from now on, the knife answers to me. Every time you use your leverage on someone, you tell me first. Every time someone tries to use their leverage on you, you tell me first. That weapon doesn’t swing unless I say it swings."

"As you command, Master."

Phei straightened slightly.

"Now. The performance."

He paced two slow steps. Jonathan remained kowtowed, tracking his master’s voice by sound alone.

"You cannot become a better husband overnight. Harold will notice. Elliot will notice. They’ve been watching you neglect Roxanne for a decade — if you suddenly start holding her hand at charity galas and gazing at her across dinner tables like a lovestruck twenty-year-old, they will wonder why.

"And that question is the first thread they pull on. Keep everything the way they’ve been in rooms where Legacy eyes can see you. Stay the distant, disappointed patriarch whose wife bores him. Inside your home, behind your own walls — that’s where she becomes the one you serve. Outside, you are exactly the husband you have always been."

"As you command, Master."

"The mistresses."

A small pause. Phei watched his own shoe.

"Don’t drop them. Not yet. Same reason. You drop them cold, Harold notices. You keep them around for another six weeks, maintain the same frequency of visits, same lies about late nights at the firm. Let them think they’re winning whatever competition they imagined they were in with your wife. And then — gradually, over a month or two — let the affairs go cold on their end, not yours.

"Stop texting back as quickly. Miss a meeting. Make them the ones who give up. By the time any of them are willing to tell a story, the story is a boring one about a Legacy patriarch who lost interest, and nobody digs into boring stories."

"As you command, Master."

"Sierra."

The word was softer. Phei watched Jonathan’s breathing hitch slightly on the name.

"When you see your daughter — and you will see her — you look at her the way you have always looked at her. You are everything the man in Harold’s mental file should be, because Harold and Elliot are going to be watching you watch her to see if the leash has slipped. It has not slipped. Jonathan Montgomery is still exactly the father Sierra thinks he is. Until I say otherwise."

"As you command, Master."

Phei crouched one last time.

"Final instruction. And I want you to listen to this one very carefully."

He waited until he was sure Jonathan had settled the rest of his body into stillness.

"You will do exactly what I tell you to do. No more. No less. If a gap appears in your instructions — if you find yourself in a situation I didn’t prepare you for, if Harold asks a question I didn’t anticipate, if a decision has to be made that I haven’t covered and you have no way out — you do not improvise. You report to me. You wait for instruction. You treat the gap as a question to be answered, not as an opening to be filled."

"As you command, Master."

"The one exception. The only exception. If responding in that exact moment is the only way to hold your cover — if hesitating would blow the entire operation — you respond in character, immediately, and you report every word to me within the hour. Do you understand?"

"As you command, Master."

"Good."

Phei straightened. Looked down at the bowed back at his feet.

The Slave Mark would do the rest.

He didn’t need to explain it to Jonathan in so many words, and didn’t. But the truth of what he’d just done — what the Mark guaranteed — sat in the back of his mind with a quiet, clean certainty.

Whatever Jonathan Montgomery improvised in the field, whatever judgement calls the man made between reports, whatever tiny decisions had to happen in the thirty seconds between Harold asking a question and Phei being informed — every single one of those choices would bend, automatically and without conscious effort on Jonathan’s part, toward whatever benefited his master most.

The Mark didn’t just bind obedience. It rewired the axis the man’s instincts now rotated around. Jonathan could not have betrayed Phei’s interest in a small matter any more than he could have voluntarily stopped his own heart.

Phei didn’t need to trust Jonathan... he belonged to him with his entire being. And also, Jonathan was insanely smart enough to run everything without Phei having to command him each and every time. Unless it was something really extreme, he’d then report back to his master.

"Eira when you’re done here, meet me where I’m going, fully, not just some part of you, love. We have a lot to do today."

"Already on my way, Master," Eira murmured — her voice just behind his shoulder even as the version of her kneeling over Jonathan kept humming that soft golden light into the ruined body on the carpet.

"Someone’s about to be released from somewhere he’s been sitting a very long time. Wouldn’t miss that for anything."

Phei smiled.

"Then let’s not keep him waiting."

He turned toward the shimmering portal Eira had left hanging by the door.

Stepped through.

The last thing he heard before the portal sealed behind him was the soft, rhythmic hum of Eira’s healing light — and, faintly, beneath it, the small wet sounds of Jonathan Montgomery’s body being reassembled into a shape his own wife would not recognise as broken.