"Yes, my lord."

"So, you mean to say, that the pages cannot be found."

"Yes, my lord."

"My own mother."

Marcus’s jaw worked like he was chewing glass.

"What is it, Anahita. What does the Dragon do to these people. That my own mother — married into this house, bedded by my father, carried me — would rather ruin her own mind than let a single thread of its knowledge be used against some dragon she’s never even met!

"What kinds of loyalty is that, Anahita. What hold. What thing does that creature inspire in women. In some stupid men like those three boys. In its own bloodline descendants.

"That my mother, Anahita, my mother, a Heavenchild by marriage for thirty years, would choose the slow demolition of her own faculties over the betrayal of that Dragon she has not even ever spoken to in all years of his existence."

Anahita said nothing.

She had heard this rant before. In different rooms, different decades. The same poison dressed as philosophy.

She kept her head bowed because lifting it would only remind him she was still breathing.

"That loyal bitch," he whispered.

A pause.

"That unbelievably, inexplicably, catastrophically loyal bitch."

Anahita lifted her eyes.

Only once, briefly. Enough for her pale luminous gaze to settle on Marcus’s face for a single heartbeat — long enough to deliver the correction her position barely permitted, short enough not to seem like rebellion.

"Not all hope is lost, my lord."

"Explain."

"Phei Ryujin Tiamat will, over time, find the pages himself." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Marcus went very still.

The air in the room seemed to tighten around Anahita’s throat like an invisible collar. She had just handed him the one thread of hope he craved — and she already knew exactly how he would use it. How he would use her.

"The Cosmic Dragon’s bloodline exerts a subconscious pull on scattered fragments of its own Tome. The Pages themselves would want to return him. He will not seek them consciously — not yet — but the pull will move him and the Pages themselves. He will be drawn to locations where pages rest, and in time, as his awakening deepens, he will begin to collect them. Without understanding why. Without even necessarily knowing what they are."

A small pause.

"There are, by my reading of the island’s cosmic architecture, at least two pages on Hell’s Paradise Island currently. Perhaps more. He is already being pulled toward them without his knowledge. He will find them within weeks. Perhaps within days."

Marcus’s cold grey eyes had begun, slowly, to warm.

Not with affection.

With calculation.

"So he finds them. Pulls them to himself. Assembles fragments of the Tome as his bloodline directs him to. Accumulates, over months, a reconstructed archive of his own inheritance that neither he nor his household would permit anyone else to access—"

"Yes, my lord."

"— unless," Marcus said slowly, "someone was already inside his household. A woman he trusted. A woman he believed to be his. A woman whose hands could pass through the same security his own hands passed through because he had, of his own will, opened that security to her."

"Yes, my lord."

"And the Pages he finds, she takes. Quietly. One at a time. And delivers them to me."

Anahita’s head lowered once. In acknowledgement.

She did not flinch. She did not need to say of what it would cost her to become that woman — the nights, the lies, the pieces of herself she would have to carve away to make Phei believe she was his.

She simply accepted the shape of the blade they were forging from her body.

"That is the plan, my lord. That is why you gave me the mission to seduce him, I assume, my wise lord. To become, to him, the one woman in his life he is willing to give unrestricted access to his everything. Not merely to his bed. To his possessions. To his archives. To the fragments of his inheritance, he does not yet understand he is collecting."

Marcus smiled.

It was, in the amber lamplight, a cold small patrician smile.

"Exactly."

He said the word like a man confirming the architecture of a perfect trap.

"Exactly, Anahita. That is it precisely."

Then —

Both of them felt it at the same instant.

Marcus’s smile dropped.

A presence entering the suit not through the door but through the wall — the subtle displacement of reality that Marcus had learned to recognise like the taste of blood before the wound even opened.

"Fuck."

Marcus’s head turned toward the corner of the room where the displacement was gathering.

A shape began to unfold there. Suspended midair near the ceiling. Bare feet crossed at the ankles.

A figure lounging casually against nothing, one arm braced behind his head, the other arm extended lazily outward in a gesture that was part greeting, part occupation of airspace, part performance.

A familiar voice — rich, amused, with the deep languor of a serpent that had eaten recently and was in no hurry —

"Helel."

Danton Maxton laughed, genuinely and without malice, the laugh of a friend finding another friend in an interesting circumstance.

"Helel, Helel, Helel. Such a terrible thing had to befall you."

Marcus gestured sharply at Anahita.

She bowed once — to Marcus, and then more briefly, more carefully, in the general direction of the floating Jörmungandr heir — and withdrew through the small doorway into the adjoining room that was hers for the duration of the trip.

She moved like smoke leaving a fire that no longer needed her. The door closed behind her with the soft finality of a cage locking. In the next room she would stand in the dark, listening to the muffled voices of two Legacy princes deciding how best to use the woman they had just dismissed like a coat rack.

She would not cry at her ptiful life, she had forgotten how years ago. She would simply wait, silver hair falling forward, until someone remembered she existed again.

Danton’s eyes tracked her exit without particular interest.

Then he floated down.

Settled lightly, barefoot, onto the cream carpet beside Marcus’s bed, arms spread, a grin spreading slowly across his young patrician face.

"Now then," Danton said pleasantly. "Prince of Earth. Sit up. You and I need to have a little chat about what we’re going to do about a certain Cosmic Dragon problem that has, this morning, announced itself rather more publicly than either of us would have preferred."

Marcus, in the amber lamplight, closed his eyes.

Then opened them.

And began, slowly, to sit up.