Kyle’s mouth opened all the way. A thick thread of bloody drool and vomit spilled over the torn lip and ran down his chin.

Phei’s left hand came around.

It was not a wound-up punch. It was not a trained one but a short, clean, contemptuous swing from a body that simply had more destructive force available to it than any human frame should have possessed.

His knuckles met Kyle’s cheekbone.

The cheekbone did not crack, instead it caved in.

The entire left side of Kyle’s face collapsed inward by a full inch, the zygomatic arch crushed flat against the upper jaw underneath.

The skin over it split in a wide ragged arc that ran from the corner of Kyle’s eye down to his jawline, and blood flooded out of it in a single immediate sheet, painting the wall, painting Phei’s knuckles, painting the shoulder of the silk dressing gown in a long streaking crimson slap.

His eye socket on that side collapsed inward, the eyeball itself rupturing with a wet pop and leaking clear vitreous fluid mixed with blood down his ruined cheek.

Kyle’s scream finally came — raw, wet, and broken — as the full hell of what Phei had just done to him crashed over him like an avalanche.

Kyle’s head rocked sideways so hard the drywall behind it gained a new crater from the rebound, the impact splitting the bone beneath his scalp with a wet crunch that sent fresh blood spraying across the wall in a fine red mist.

He screamed.

It was a wet, airless, high-pitched scream that barely escaped his throat because Phei’s hand was still there, crushing his windpipe down to a paper straw.

What came out was less a scream than a desperate, dying whistle — a high eeeeeeee sound that wavered, cracked, and dissolved into wet gurgling at the end because the blood flooding his mouth had nowhere to go and was backing up into his throat, choking him on his own ruin.

"How do you think she felt, Kyle?"

Phei’s voice had dropped into something so quiet it was almost gentle — the calm whisper of a devil who had all the time in the world.

"How do you think my Selene felt — that bright, that brilliant good girl — when you stood at the roof door that night and kept it closed for him? While he did what he did to her. While he took what he took. While he ended what he ended. You were the lookout, Kyle. You. Her classmate. Someone she had said hello to in the hallway earlier that same week after you beat me, trying to be nice hoping you could show mercy.

"Tell me, Kyle. In that moment — when she was surrounded and helpless with no means of escape — what do you think she felt?"

"I— Phei — please — oh god — I didn’t — please —"

Another punch.

This one to the mouth.

Kyle’s upper lip burst like a pinched tomato, skin parting in three directions at once, the corners tearing back toward the cheeks so that the whole front of his face opened up into a raw, wet, pink ruin beneath.

Two front teeth rocked loose and came partway out of the gum in a single wet pop, hanging from their roots by threads of tissue like broken fenceposts. A third snapped cleanly at the gumline and disappeared into the red flood inside his mouth.

Kyle made a choking, drowning noise and the tooth came back up on the next convulsive cough, tumbling down his chin on a thick ribbon of spit, blood, and fragments of enamel.

"Please — Phei — please — I’ll do anything — I’ll say anything — please I’m begging you —"

"You helped him fucking drug her. That’s what y’all Legacy do, isn’t it? Drug girls and do as you desire, isn’t Kyle?"

Kyle tried to shake his head — tried — but the hand around his throat would not permit it.

The movement only ground his skull harder against the broken drywall behind him, driving jagged fragments of plaster and wood into the back of his scalp and sending new rivers of blood down his neck.

"You brought him the needles, Kyle. You. Your side business. Your little pharmaceutical empire. Your cute entrepreneurial venture you ran out of the Ashford Elite locker rooms to feel like a big man in front of your friends. You were the one who supplied the sedative. You were the one who handed it to him.

"You were the one who stood there while he put a fucking needle in a girl who had never touched a drug in her life. A girl who was seventeen. A girl whose blood — when they tested it on the tape I’ve seen, Kyle, on the tape your friends thought they’d buried — had compounds in it that only you possessed at school."

"P — Phei —"

"Don’t you dare deny it."

Phei’s voice was rising now. Tight. Controlled. Gathering like a storm that had already decided to drown him.

Cassiopeia, still seated across the room, closed her eyes for one second. Opened them again. Did not look away.

Her thighs had started trembling uncontrollably.

Phei pulled Kyle off the wall.

Spun him like a rag doll.

Slammed him into the opposite wall with force enough to crack the studs behind the drywall on impact, the new dent a mirror image of the first. Kyle’s body hit, bounced once, and slumped only because Phei had not let go of his throat.

The fresh crater in the wall began quietly shedding flakes of plaster and wood onto Kyle’s shoulder.

One of the flakes landed directly on his tongue through the open ruin of his mouth and he tried desperately to spit it out. He could not. He could not move his face enough to do anything but choke.

"Why, Kyle."

Another punch. This one hammered straight into the ribs on the left side — the side Phei’s kick had already caved in, the side that was no longer structurally a ribcage so much as a loose collection of bone gravel held together by shredded muscle and skin.

The punch landed in the middle of the damage and drove in, and something inside Kyle’s chest made a wet, meaty pop as a jagged rib end tore through lung tissue.

Kyle’s remaining eye bulged so hard the blood vessels in it burst in a red spray across the white, painting the inside of his eyelid crimson.

"Why."

Another. Same spot. A lower rib this time — if there was any distinction left between ribs and gravel. Another pop.

Kyle’s whole body convulsed violently around the impact and a thin jet of bright arterial blood came up his throat and sprayed across Phei’s forearm in a hot mist.

Kyle began to cry — not composed weeping, not dignified distress, but raw, open, animal sobbing, his body deciding without permission from the conscious mind that begging through tears and snot and blood was the only survival strategy left available.

"Please — please — Phei I’m sorry — oh god oh god — I’m sorry — Phei please — I’ll — I can — please —"

"Because Marcus asked you to? Is that it?" Phei’s voice had not risen. It stayed low, almost intimate. "The Heavenchild heir clicked his fingers and his little drug dealer friend came running with a case full of pharmaceutical-grade sedatives and drugs to help him commit a rape and a murder because Marcus asked?

"Were you that desperate for his approval, Kyle? Was his friendship that valuable to you?"

Another punch. The ribs. Something in there actually tore through skin this time — a small jagged end of bone pushing up beneath the silk dressing gown, tenting the fabric, then breaking through it in a slow, wet, spreading stain of blood and shredded meat.

"Or—" his voice softened into something even more dangerous, almost loving, "— or was it just that... your little side business, Kyle? Your empire? The thrill of being the drug lord of the Legacy locker room? Was it the kick, Kyle? Was it the buzz of having Marcus as a client for once — the Earth Prince — asking you for product you’d only ever sold to each other for recreational weekends?

"Did it make you feel important, Kyle? Did it make you feel finally seen by the boy whose boots you’d been licking your whole life? Did it feel good to hand him the needles, Kyle? Did it feel good to watch my Selene get dragged up to that roof?"

"I’M SORRY" — Kyle’s voice broke entirely on the word, dissolving into a wet, gurgling sob — "I’M SORRY PHEI — I’M SORRY — I’M SO — I’M SO SORRY — please — please please please —"

Phei did not hear him.