"What the FUCK do you want, Phei?"

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees in a single breath — as if hell itself had just drawn a slow, hungry inhale.

Luckily the room was sealed off by Eira.

Phei looked at Kyle across the coffee table — calm for a heartbeat, utterly calm — and then something behind his amethyst eyes simply came loose. Snapped. Unleashed.

All the anger he’d been sitting on from the moment he saw Kyle was let free.

"What do I want."

"I—"

"What do I want."

"Phei—"

"How dare you ask me that."

The couch Phei had been sitting on did not register what happened next. One moment he was seated. The next he was a blur of violet fury, airborne across the coffee table, the crystal decanter and everything else on it exploding into shrapnel against the far wall from the sheer pressure wave of his passage. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Before Kyle’s brain could even begin to process the motion, Phei’s foot connected with his chest.

A single kick dead centre of his chest.

There was no impact sound but a single detonation.

Kyle’s chest exploded inward like a claymore mine going off behind his ribcage. and the bone shattered into razor shards that tore straight through lungs, heart sac, and diaphragm in a wet, grinding catastrophe. Ribs on both sides splintered like matchsticks, the jagged ends punching inward to lacerate everything soft and vital.

His heart stuttered and half-crushed against his spine. Both lungs collapsed in the same instant with a sickening whoosh of air and blood.

All of that happened in a single instant the moment the 300+ strength kick landed.

The force lifted Kyle and the entire cream-leather couch beneath him as one fused projectile — and hurled them backward across the enormous room like they had been fired from a cannon.

They cleared six metres of open parquet in less than a second and hit the far wall with a BOOM that cracked the plaster from floor to ceiling and bowed the drywall outward in a concave dish shape. Kyle’s skull rang off the wall with a wet crack that split the bone.

The couch pinned Kyle there for one endless heartbeat, crushing what was left of his ruined chest even flatter, then gravity remembered its job and the entire mass collapsed forward onto him in a crumpled, splintering heap of cream leather, shattered oak, and broken man.

Kyle disappeared underneath the couch.

A thin, wet whimper leaked out from beneath it — the last sound a dying animal makes when it realises it can’t breathe.

Then a wetter one — a gagging, choking rattle as his sternum tried and failed to remember how to let air back into a chest that was now a collapsed ruin of bone splinters and flooding blood. Every shallow, desperate attempt to inhale only drove the jagged ribs deeper.

Blood bubbled up his throat and spilled from his mouth in thick ropes. His bladder emptied instantly, hot piss soaking through the navy lounge pants and spreading across the parquet in a shameful puddle.

His bowels followed a second later, voiding in helpless, uncontrollable spasms.

Cassiopeia did not move.

She sat exactly where she had been sitting. Legs crossed. Hands folded. Face composed.

But something behind her dark eyes recalibrated, slowly and permanently, in real time.

She had known Phei was strong. But this — this casual, effortless annihilation of a grown man and an entire couch — was something else entirely. Something divine and terrifying.

She did not finish the mental calculation of exactly how strong her master was.

She did, however, very deliberately re-cross her legs the other way, because the sudden, soaking wetness that had just flooded between her thighs was no longer inappropriate. It was necessary. It pulsed in time with Kyle’s wet, drowning whimpers, and she understood — quiet, clinical, long since at peace with what being Phei’s meant — that she was going to sit here and watch this man be broken into meat with her thighs clenched tight for as long as it took.

’Broken girl,’ Eira shook her head.

Cassiopeia did not look away.

She did not intend to.

Phei was already moving.

He crossed the floor in two long unhurried strides, reached the wrecked couch, and gripped it by the underside of its wooden frame with a single hand. His fingers closed around oak thick enough to require a crowbar to splinter.

He lifted it and threw it away.

The couch — a hundred and thirty kilos of leather, stuffing, oak and iron — left his hand like a discarded napkin and sailed clear across the room, smashing into the far corner and reducing a decorative marble console to pulverised gravel on the way down.

Kyle lay on the parquet where the couch had pinned him.

He was no longer quite right in shape.

His chest was caved inward by a good four inches, the sternum visibly sunken like a crater beneath the torn silk dressing gown. Every breath was a wet, sucking death-rattle. One lung had already filled with blood. The ribs on his left side were no longer attached to anything structural — they floated loose inside him, grinding against each other with every tiny movement. His silk dressing gown hung open.

The navy lounge pants were dark and heavy from waistband to mid-thigh with fresh piss and shit. A thin trail of urine and worse was still spreading beneath him. His hairline was split wide open above the temple, blood pouring down into his eye in thick, blinding rivers.

His left shoulder sat three inches lower than his right, the joint completely obliterated, the arm dangling at an obscene angle that made the whole side of his body look like a broken doll.

He was still conscious.

Lucky him.

His one uncovered eye was rolling in pure animal panic.

He was trying to say something.

"Please" was probably the first word. It was impossible to tell. Half his mouth was already filling with blood, his lip torn open from where his own teeth had been driven through it on impact.

Phei bent before he gripped Kyle by the throat with one hand.

He lifted him clean off the floor effortlessly upward like he was picking up garbage. He walked three steps to the nearest solid wall and slammed Kyle against it at shoulder height with force enough that the drywall exploded inward behind Kyle’s back.

A perfect circle of cracked plaster radiated outward like a spiderweb. The wooden studs behind it snapped like bones.

One of them punched through the wall and into Kyle’s spine with a wet crunch.

Phei held him there.

One hand.

Two full feet off the floor.

Kyle’s own feet dangled and kicked weakly at nothing. His right hand — the only one still obeying him — scrabbled frantically at Phei’s wrist, at Phei’s forearm, nails breaking against skin that might as well have been steel. His nails left no marks.

His fingers were already shaking from oxygen starvation. His ruined chest heaved uselessly against the iron grip, every attempt to breathe only forcing more blood up his throat and out his mouth in thick, gurgling sprays that painted Phei’s arm and chest.

Phei lowered his face to Kyle’s until their noses almost touched and smiled.

It was not a nice smile.

It was the smile of something that had decided mercy was a joke.

"How dare you ask me what I want."

"I— please —"

"Do you feel wronged, Kyle? Do you feel a little mistreated by me tonight? Imposed upon? Invaded?"

"P-please — Phei — I’m — I can’t —"

"What about my girlfriend, Kyle?"

Kyle’s face went corpse-white underneath the mask of blood.

The whites of his remaining eye expanded around the iris until they were almost all Phei could see. His mouth worked uselessly. The sound that came out was not a word. It was a thin, high, keening wail — an animal that had just realised it was already dead.

"What about Selene, Kyle?"

"What —"

"The girl you helped Marcus Heavenchild take to the roof that night."