The penthouse was pregnant with silence so sharp it almost had a temperature that pressed against the glass, pooled in the corners as it settled over the floor like cold ash after a fire no one wanted to name.

Far below, the island continued glittering with its usual shameless indifference, all golden windows and expensive lies, as if the city had not spent the morning being dragged through enough disgrace and orchestrated ruins.

Cities were talented like that; they could watch lives collapse and still remember to look pretty for the tourists.

Cassiopeia’s breathing was the only proof that life remained inside the room.

Each of her breath came rough and uneven scraped from her chest exhausted by confession, tears, and the cruel labour of finally saying aloud what had been rotting in silence.

She sat curled near the couch, eyes lowered, shoulders trembling with the remains of a breakdown she had not earned the luxury to dramatize. That thought had made the crying worse.

Cassiopeia knew it...

...Apologies did not purchase relief and tears did not refund blood that had been spilled and neither did regret walk backward through time and return killed children to their mothers.

Still, she had cried...

...Even as the shame sat beside her like a second body.

Phei sat near her feet and said nothing.

His stillness to Cassiopeia was worse than anger.

His mind moved too quickly beneath that calm face.

Cassiopeia could almost feel it, that terrible silent machinery of his taking apart everything he had just learned from her and reassembling it into something colder.

Things had happened while he was in his penthouse. Two women in his life had found each other in the wreckage of an old crime, and Cassiopeia had opened herself before Melissa like a wound finally tired of pretending it was scar tissue.

And while Phei had been in the next room.

’Oblivious.’

Then afterward, he had made love to Melissa.

The thought sat in him like a stone under the tongue.

Melissa had been distant like she was sad when he found her. Only slightly and a little heavier in the eyes, a little slower in the silence between touches.

He had noticed, but he had mistaken it for one of the private griefs she carried with such polished discipline.

Melissa had always been good at that, walking around with pain in her marrow while making the world think she was simply composed.

’I have always thought she would tell me when she is ready.’

He had been wrong.

Cassiopeia on the other hand had been drowning in guilt since Melissa’s words had found her and stayed there, pressing down with the full weight of truth.

And Melissa had been right.

That was the cruelest part, she had not even loud or theatrical...

...Just right in the way truth often was, sitting there like an executioner with excellent posture, waiting for excuses to run out of breath.

Cassiopeia had tried to act as if nothing had happened between their families.

As if a clean slate could be stolen by wanting one badly enough...

As if stepping into Phei’s world with an apology in her mouth could somehow separate Cassiopeia from the Maxtons, woman from her surname, desire from inheritance...

As if names and the crimes her family had doesn’t to Melissa and her family were coats you could hang by the door instead of chains welded into history.

The audacity of it.

Her audacity.

How dare she.

Phei finally moved, only a small shift and the rustle of fabric in a faint movement of his open coat as he settled more fully beside her and turned his gaze toward the city.

From this height, island wore its lights like stolen jewellery...

Beautiful, yes... but beauty was cheap when purchased with other people’s suffering. The island had made an entire economy out of polished corruption.

Very efficient. Very elegant. Very human... unfortunately.

Phei could not look at it for long.

His jaw was set and when Cassiopeia saw it and lowered her head further.

That expression belonged to a man holding something caged inside himself through will alone, and whatever lived behind those bars was pressing hard.

He did not touch her.

He did not comfort her:

Phei did not offer her the soft mercy she wanted and did not deserve.

’Melissa.’

The name moved through his silence like something swallowed with difficulty.

Phei understood more now:

Melissa had pain living deep inside her, pain so old it had stopped behaving like a wound and become part of her weather. Cassiopeia had heard it in every word Melissa had spoken.

The controlled fury. The grief that time had not softened. The losses carved so deep into her that they shaped the way she stood, the way she looked away, the way her voice remained calm when it should have broken.

No wonder Melissa had never brought the full weight of it to him.

What was she supposed to do? Pour grief into someone already full of it? Ask a boy hollowed out by the same hands to hold the shape of her ruin too? They had both been robbed off of the things they loved and left to live around absences they never chose.

And every time Melissa looked at Cassiopeia now roaming around her and her new family, she saw a living face wearing the crest of the family that had taken so much from her and everything from Phei.

Melissa had every right to be angry.

"She has every right, you know." Phei finally said.

He did not look at Cassiopeia when he said it. He spoke to the window, to the city, to the cold air between them. His voice was flat; not empty, worse:

Certain.

Cassiopeia’s throat tightened.

"I know." Her voice cracked around the words. "I know she does. I have no right to say this, but I am sorry. I know what my family did. What we did. Every time I see Delilah. Every time I see you. It is there. I do feel that pain too, Phei!" Her hands curled weakly against her heart.

"My heart aches too at the though of what we took from her... what we took from all of you."

Silence followed.

Not the soft kind.

Phei remained still for a long moment, and Cassiopeia felt the room shrink around her at the fury that was uncaging itself from him... the place was suddenly so small, sharp and cold and she was trapped in it; then he turned his head and looked at her.