Landon occupied the far end with Cherry — his girl, his laugh, his anchor, the one who made him bearable even when he was being his most insufferably dramatic self and she was currently feeding him a piece of mango off her own fork, in ana exaggerated public display of affection.

Landon accepted the bite with the soul-confiscated, love-captured expression like he’d surrendered entirely and was perfectly fine with the terms.

David sat beside them, alone. Poor David. Despite all of Landon’s running commentary on his prospects and David’s own increasingly desperate attempts to manufacture rizz, the boy had not, in fact, pulled any of the myriad women who had drifted through their orbit in the last fortnight.

He now watched Brian feed his own woman a piece of pineapple and then lean forward to kiss a stray drop of juice from the corner of her mouth with unhurried affection.

Brian, fully, irreversibly captured.

Brian’s girl was the flight attendant from the Hell’s Paradise Island flight—tall, graceful Rhea with the French accent and the quietly amused eyes. Warm caramel skin glowing under the cabin lights, tight curls framing a face that belonged on magazine covers... she had moved into Brian’s shared penthouse, with the easy certainty.

She saw no reason to overthink her destiny. Her choice was made.

She rested her cheek on Brian’s shoulder now. Brian was smiling.

Across the table, Landon rolled his eyes so hard Cherry actually laughed out loud.

"If that traitor," Landon muttered to her, voice carrying just loud enough for the whole table to savor the outrage, "gave me even one percent of that syrupy sweetness his giving Rhea and quit roasting me at every damn opportunity for a single day — the world would be perfect. But nooo. He hoards it all for her like some emotional war criminal."

David nodded mournfully into his espresso.

Brian, hearing every syllable, didn’t miss a beat. He simply tilted his head and kissed Rhea’s hair with the serene confidence... clearly he had already won the only game that mattered.

Landon let out a strangled noise of pure generational indignation. "I swear to God, the betrayal is generational at this point."

Phei, entering the Hall at that exact moment in a charcoal button-down and dark slacks that did criminal things to his already criminal silhouette, took in the whole tableau and grinned — slow, predatory, and unfairly beautiful.

"Gentlemen."

Landon jabbed a finger across the table like a man filing an official complaint with the universe. "Phei. Phei. Look at this. Look what he’s become. I demand a refund on our friendship."

"It’s beautiful, Landon," Phei said, sliding into his seat with the effortless grace of a god who knew exactly how good he looked doing it.

"It’s a goddamn war crime against every single man still flying solo!"

"Stop roasting your friend." Cherry offered with a smile.

"He started it! Months ago! I’m just the innocent civilian casualty in this generational warfare — I’m not even a combatant, I’m collateral damage with feelings!"

Rhea, without lifting her cheek from Brian’s shoulder, smiled serenely at the ceiling, enjoying the show.

Phei let the chaos of the breakfast table wash over him like a king who had already conquered the realm and was now merely enjoying the delightful mess his subjects made of breakfast.

He took his seat at the head and accepted the first cup of coffee the staff placed before him with the quiet grace of a seventeen-year-old god who knew exactly how devastating he looked doing something as mundane as sipping caffeine.

Maddie, already halfway through an egg-white omelette she had demanded be made with twice the cheese because rules were for mortals, slid her bare foot along his calf under the table in a greeting that was equal parts hello and mine.

Sierra, beside her, elegantly pretended not to notice while somehow radiating approval imaginable.

Melissa’s hand came to rest over his on the linen tablecloth for a long, wordless moment — a queen’s gentle confirmation that the morning was in hand, the day’s architecture already blueprinted, and he could simply be for the length of this meal — before she lifted it away again to cradle her cappuccino like the small, civilized weapon it was.

Ashford Madam was several seats down, inclined her head toward him in a small, respectful morning greeting that carried the precise weight of old money acknowledging new apocalypse.

Elena Ashford, seated beside her mother with her eyes fixed on her plate like it might betray her, glanced up once and blushed the color of expensive sin.

Phei returned the nod and took the first sip of coffee, permitting himself, quietly, the small, satisfied internal acknowledgement that this — this right here — was a morning a seventeen-year-old Cosmic Dragon had absolutely, gloriously, fuck-you-earned. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

But he was distracted.

He could feel it himself — the slight, telling lag between the room asking something of him and his attention deigning to arrive and meet it.

Landon cracked one of his signature roasts; Phei laughed a quarter-beat late, the sound still unfairly beautiful. Cherry asked him something about the basketball game schedule they’d planned in a few days; Phei answered correctly, but his eyes had already drifted past her toward the window for the length of a breath before the words caught up.

Maddie nudged his thigh with her knee twice in quick succession and he only registered the second nudge, the first lost somewhere in the vivid afterimage still playing behind his eyelids.

His mind kept returning.

To the realm.

To that version of himself.

The Phei who had fought inside Kyle’s soul realm was still, in the vivid, immediate way of things too recent to have mellowed into mere memory, replaying behind his eyes like a private highlight reel.

Every few seconds the image would flash uninvited: Kyle bent double under a casual wrist lock, Kyle’s skull driven into shattered stone, Kyle bowing in feudal surrender while that ancient progenitor’s voice echoed in his mind — Master.

The unhurried, sovereign ease with which that Phei had moved.

The complete and utter absence of strain, as if dismantling an obscenely powerful vampire-prince had been nothing more taxing than folding laundry.

Could he become that version of himself for more than fleeting windows? Phei wondered, the thought sharpening like a blade in the dark. Could that him be trained into waking life?

Could the cosmic self he had briefly inhabited inside the soul realm be practiced into a reliable resting state rather than some exotic theatre accessible only in the peculiar geography of a chained progenitor’s inner hell?

No — he corrected himself, because the right question was always sharper, meaner, more useful.

’What would it take?’

What vicious, unrelenting training would it take to make that version of himself something he could slip into at will? How long? How brutal?

What parts of him would have to be broken down and rebuilt like faulty scaffolding until that all-powerful Cosmic Dragon stopped being a visitor and became the default operating system?

And — the thought that had been circling beneath all the others since he first opened his eyes in that godforsaken white bedroom — how much safer would his women be if he could access that power reliably?

Maddie’s foot still tracing lazy claim under the table. Sierra’s elegant profile, sharp enough to cut glass and twice as cold. Melissa’s hand that had rested, briefly, like a vow on his.

Roxanne still recovering across town. Valentina. Patricia. Delilah, Ashford Madam, Amber. Every single one of them and others currently safe because Danton had not yet decided to move, because Marcus was still a Dormant, and because the Destined Day had not yet arrived with its teeth bared.

Currently safe.

But not permanently safe against a fully awakened Danton, against Marcus once that Original Angel bloodline finished surfacing like some celestial horror show. Not safe against any Original Progenitor who decided to stop playing games and come directly for Phei’s household with murder in mind.

But Soul-Realm-Phei — the version of him that had treated Kyle like a mildly inconvenient piece of antique trash — that Phei would have turned the entire question of his women’s safety into something so trivial it ceased to exist as a question at all.

He had to train.

He had to train.