Heavy velvet drapes strangled the morning light, turning the room into a suffocating pocket of false night. One lamp burned low on the bedside table, its amber glow crawling across cream silk sheets like it was afraid to touch too much.

The air reeked of expensive incense trying to hide the sour stench of fear-sweat and broken pride. An intravenous line fed into Marcus Heavenchild’s wrist like a leash.

An earpiece lay warm on the pillow, still carrying the ghost of his father’s voice.

His skin was the color of old ash but it was no result of from blood loss or shock. Something deeper had cracked open inside him after Phei put him on the floor in front of half a million eyes.

His Original Angel blood was clawing its way up from wherever it had been buried, and his ruined body was paying the price in burst capillaries and the metallic taste of defeat.

He was burning in rage that transcended anything!

Anahita stood beside the bed in the small form they forced her to wear — the version of herself Marcus allowed in private.

Her head was bowed while he hands folded like a servant who had forgotten she ever had another shape.

Silver-blonde hair fell like a curtain over the left side of her face, hiding what little expression she was still permitted; barefoot and dressed in a plain white shift the staff had been ordered to pretend wasn’t clothing at all.

She had been standing there for forty minutes.

Motionless.

"You let it happen."

Marcus’s voice came out raw, scraped bloody from screaming into pillows when the memory of Phei’s actions finally dragged him back to consciousness.

"I was standing four feet from you, Anahita. You were right there. You could’ve stopped him. One breath of your real power — one fucking breath — and that dragon bastard would’ve been nothing but ash on the marble. You were right there."

Anahita did not lift her head.

"Master Elliot forbade it, my lord."

The words were soft. Practiced. The same ones she had used for twenty-seven years.

"The Lord Father too, was listening through watching the entire time. He gave the order. Any reveal of my presence would’ve burned the concealment we’ve kept for decades. He said your humiliation was an acceptable cost."

Marcus’s pale eyes locked onto her bowed head.

"My Grandfather and my father are not your masters, Anahita."

Ice in his voice now.

"I am."

"You answer to me. You listen to me. You move when I say move. Not him or my father. Say it."

Anahita’s head stayed down.

"I answer to you alone, my lord."

"Say it properly."

"I listen only to your orders. I act only on your will. I will never again let the Lord Father’s and Master Elliot’s commands override yours."

Marcus stared at her for a long, cold moment.

Then he exhaled, long and shaky, because even through his rage he knew his grandfather and father had been right.

If Anahita had stepped in with her true powers and form while people and then five hundred thousand more were watching, the entire Heavenchild game would’ve ended in one hour. Every Legacy house would’ve known what they’d been hiding.

Their masterplan would’ve died screaming.

He hated that his father was right.

He hated her for being the proof of it.

"Then explain something to me, Anahita."

His voice dropped into that dangerous, controlled register.

"Why the fuck didn’t you warn me he could do that?"

He gestured at his own face, at the dried blood at the corner of his mouth, at the ruin Phei had made of him in under a minute.

"You’re supposed to know these things. You’re supposed to read every threat in this existence and tell me what they’re capable of before I walk into a room. That wasn’t some basic aura or intent. That was the infamous Cosmic Dragon Domain slammed straight into my soul.

And I had nothing. No warning or preparation. I walked in thinking I was dealing with a seventeen-year-old dragon with just his Ice powers and I left sitting in my own piss while something ancient looked through me like I was glass."

Anahita bowed even lower.

"It is my purpose, my lord."

"Then do your fucking purpose."

The slap came fast — a sharp, backhanded crack across the right side of her face.

It wasn’t the force that hurt the most.

It was the casualness.

The way his hand moved like he was swatting an insect that had dared to exist too close to his anger.

The sound split the quiet room like a bone breaking under silk.

Anahita did not flinch or dare to step back.

She did not raise a hand to the red mark blooming across her cheek.

Her head stayed bowed, silver hair now slightly disheveled where the blow had caught it. The red print on her skin stood out stark against the pale she always wore in his presence.

She had learned long ago that flinching only made them hit harder.

Marcus’s breathing was ragged.

"You’re supposed to protect me," he said, voice low and shaking with leftover humiliation. "That’s why you exist. That’s the only reason you’re still breathing. And you stood there and let that... that thing... do this to me."

He stared at her bowed head; at the way she accepted the slap like it was weather.

"Look at me."

She lifted her face just enough for him to see the mark.

Marcus’s lip curled.

"Pathetic."

He turned his face away, disgusted — not with himself, but with the fact that even his anger couldn’t make her break. She just stood there, small, barefoot, in the shift that wasn’t considered clothing, carrying twenty-seven years of swallowed screams behind silver-blonde hair.

Anahita remained exactly where she was.

Because that was the life they had given her.

And in the dark, with the incense trying to cover the smell of his shame and her silence, she simply waited for whatever came next.

Because that was what she had been trained to do.

Stand. Bow. Endure.

And never, ever let them see how much of her had already died in rooms just like this one.

"That," Marcus finally said, very quietly, "is why I told you, Anahita. To find them. To find the missing pages of the Tome. All of them. Every scattered scrap. Because only when the Tome is reassembled can I know what this dragon is capable of. Only when the Tome is whole can I claim what is rightfully mine — and know all the powers the Cosmic Dragon’s line lost during the Primordial Sundering. That was the task. The priority. The single mission you have had above all others for years. Tell me you have made progress."

"I have searched, my lord."

"How much of the world did you search?"

"All of it."

A pause.

"I have searched every continent even this very island’s own forbidden zones, even Paradise itself, every, monasteries, temples, desert, old Venetian collections, lost Ottoman caches. Every location and death zones Lord Father’s predecessors ever suspected. My lord — I have looked everywhere."

A longer pause.

The words left her mouth like stones dropped into a well that had no bottom. Forty minutes standing and years of sleepless nights across every corner of earth some even completely hidden from maps. And still she stood here, barefoot in the shift that wasn’t clothing, waiting for the next verdict on her worth.

"The Pages are extraordinarily well hidden. And — my lord — they do not appear, to be held by the Ryujin Tiamat either. The family does not possess their own ancestral Tome."

Marcus’s hand lifted again.

Anahita bowed another half-inch in anticipation of the second slap.

It did not come.

Marcus exhaled. Lowered his hand. Let it fall back to the silk of the sheets.

"There is no hope, then." His voice was flat. "Not until my mother recovers."

"There is no hope through the Tome’s retrieval until your mother recovers, yes, my lord. That is correct."

"My own mother."

Marcus’s voice had gone quiet with a specific bitterness, the kind a man saves for the wound that refuses to close.

"The one woman in this house who might have pointed me directly to at least four pages. The one woman whose cognition, properly preserved, would have given us a map. And she has spent every lucid interval of the last nineteen years — every window between her episodes, every clear hour, every morning when she remembered her own name — corrupting her own memories. Deliberately. Burning out the parts of her own mind that contain Tome’s knowledge the moment she senses those memories have returned."

"Yes, my lord."

"So that we cannot extract them."