Chapter 490: Through the Night

The television murmured like a drunk uncle at a wedding, spilling canned laughter into the dark while its blue glow painted the walls in sickly pulses. I wasn’t watching. Couldn’t. The screen may as well have been a fish tank full of plastic clowns. My skull was the real circus, and the ringmaster was a pair of women who’d slipped past every barbed-wire fence I’d ever built around myself.

Mia. Mom.

One wore sin like couture; the other wore exhaustion like a second skin. Both were wrecking me from the inside out.

Mia—Tommy’s girl, the forbidden fruit dangling so low it bruised my knuckles every time I reached.

Tonight she’d floated down those stairs in lace pants so sheer they were basically a rumor. Moonlight through gauze. The sway of her hips had been a metronome counting down to damnation. That black top? A couple of rebellious ribbons playing hide-and-seek with gravity. Every strip of bare skin felt like a dare scribbled in neon across my retinas.

One breath, one accidental brush of her fingers on my shoulder, and the Lust Presence had roared up my spine like molten mercury, whispering:

Take. Ruin. Keep.

Then there was Mom. The thought alone felt like swallowing broken glass. Complicated didn’t begin to cover it. Complicated was a Sunday crossword. This was a goddamn labyrinth with no exit and mirrors on every wall.

My cock jerked against my zipper like it had its own heartbeat and a vendetta. I shifted, hissed, adjusted—useless. Meridian had been a battlefield today. Dominique folded in half until her legs forgot their purpose.

Catherine’s office still probably smelled like sex and shredded dignity.

Yet here I was, vibrating like a tuning fork dipped in gasoline, ready to burn the whole night down for one more hit.

I thought about Catherine—Christ, Catherine—limping through tomorrow’s board meeting with my fingerprints bruised into her thighs and zero clue I was balls-deep in her niece’s heart.

Thirty-three grand in SP for that particular family forbidden love. Total sitting pretty at three-hundred-seventy large. Thirty-seven million in cold hard cash if I ever felt poor again.

Funny how numbers lose flavor once you can buy islands on a whim. Back when I was Peter Carter—skinny knees, empty pockets, Mom’s disappointed sigh echoing off cracked linoleum—those zeroes would’ve tasted like heaven.

Now they were just confetti in a hurricane.

Sweat trickled down my temple. Heart slugging against ribs like it wanted out. Jaw locked so tight I could’ve ground diamonds. The Lust Presence coiled under my skin, a dragon pacing its cage, tail lashing, smoke curling from its nostrils.

"ARIA," I rasped, voice raw as torn velvet. "Mom’s ETA?"

"Shift ends in forty-eight minutes, boss. Seventy until she’s wheels-down in the driveway. She’ll do her usual victory lap—check Mr. Patel’s morphine, steal one last candy from the nurses’ station. You know the ritual."

Seventy minutes.

An eternity measured in heartbeats and bad decisions.

Seventy minutes to sit here with my dragon and my demons and the ghost of Mia’s lace swaying like a pendulum between salvation and hell.

I dragged both hands through my hair, pulled until my scalp screamed. The pain was clean. Anchoring.

I stood abruptly, unable to sit still anymore.

The house settled around me as I moved to my bedroom—I grabbed my leather jacket from the hall closet—Italian leather, custom fitted, soft as butter and smelling like money and bergamot from the cologne I’d worn earlier.

The weight of it settled over my shoulders, familiar, comforting in a way I didn’t question. Then I reached for the spare one— will be for Mom.

Outside, the cool air hit different. Not cold—LA didn’t do cold, not really—but less oppressively hot.

The gate recognized my biometrics and opened silently as I approached—facial recognition, thermal imaging, probably three other security measures ARIA had implemented that I’d never asked about. It swung inward smooth and silent, expensive engineering making tons of metal move like it weighed nothing.

I walked through, and the cool LA night wrapped around me completely. The temperature drop was subtle but noticeable—maybe five degrees cooler outside the property, that microclimate difference money could buy.

The mansion across ours loomed—some tech executive’s place, all glass and steel and aggressive architecture, lights off, probably empty half the year while they traveled to Aspen or Dubai or wherever rich people went to pretend they weren’t home.

I paid it zero attention.

I could’ve driven to my estate. The Phantom was right there. Ten minutes of leather and silence and that V12 engine that sounded like money being incinerated, and I’d be at headquarters where my empire operated, where my women waited, where I could lose myself in pleasure until sunrise.

Madison would probably already be there, or she’d come if I called. Sofia would answer on the first ring. Isabella would make an excuse to her husband and drive over. Any of them would welcome me with open arms and legs and mouths and everything else I needed.

But that’s exactly why I couldn’t go.

Going there meant giving in. Meant admitting I couldn’t control this enhanced libido, this post-Lust-Incarnate transformation that had amplified every masculine trait to eleven. Meant becoming the kind of man who fucked his way through problems instead of facing them.

I’d come here instead of going home—staying at Mom’s was the only thing keeping me from giving in completely. Use her presence as shield against my own worst impulses. Let her unknowingly anchor me to something that wasn’t conquest or pleasure or power...

Some anchor I didn’t understand; some pull that made me want to be near her instead of chasing the next conquest.

Except she wasn’t here. Wouldn’t be for another hour plus. And sitting in that quiet mansion fighting images of Mia’s ass and the persistent demands of my cock wasn’t working.

My feet made the decision before my brain caught up.

I started walking.

Physical movement burning off some of this restless energy.

The quantum watch on my wrist tracked my vitals—I could feel it there, titanium and sapphire crystal and technology that shouldn’t exist yet, sitting against my pulse point like a second heartbeat.

"Master," her voice whispered through the earpiece I always wore—custom fit, nearly invisible, connected directly to my auditory nerve in ways that would make neuroscientists weep, "you’re walking to Mercy General Hospital."

"Yeah."

"That’s 2.7 miles from your current location. Approximately forty-three minutes at your current pace."

"I know."

"You own a four-hundred-thousand-dollar car that could cover that distance in approximately seven minutes."

"I’m aware."

A pause—ARIA processing, analyzing, probably running psychological assessments on why I’d choose walking over driving when I could afford to teleport if such technology existed. The silence stretched just long enough to be noticeable before she spoke again.

"You’re going to pick up your mother," she said finally. Not a question. Statement of fact delivered with that particular tone that meant she’d already analyzed every possible motivation and narrowed it down to the most likely.

"Yeah."

"May I ask why?"

"Because I miss her."

The words came out simpler than I intended. More honest than comfortable. Just... true. Raw. Unfiltered in a way I rarely allowed myself to be even with ARIA.

I missed Mom.

Missed her in ways that didn’t make sense given I’d seen her this morning, given I lived in her house, given I could literally afford to buy the hospital she worked at if I wanted guaranteed access.

But I missed her presence. Her voice—that specific tone she used when she was tired but trying not to show it, when she was worried but didn’t want me to know, when she was proud and couldn’t hide it. The way she looked at me like I was still just Peter, not Eros, not the Dark Lord, not the billion-dollar empire builder—just her son who she’d raised and sacrificed for and loved unconditionally.

In her presence, something in me relaxed. The constant strategic thinking quieted. The overwhelming libido dulled. The god complex and narcissism and territorial aggression all settled into something manageable. My shoulders loosened. My jaw unclenched. My heart rate dropped to something approaching normal instead of this constant elevated state of fight-or-fuck.

She was the only person who could look at me and see me—not the supernatural seducer, not the tech genius, not the system-enhanced anomaly. Just Peter. Just the kid she’d adopted after his birth mother died, the boy she’d worked double shifts to feed, the teenager she’d protected from a world that wanted to destroy him.

And I missed her.

More than I probably should. More than made sense. More than I wanted to examine too closely because the feelings got complicated and messy and touched on shit I wasn’t ready to unpack.

The walk gave me space to breathe. To let my mind wander without television’s artificial noise or the mansion’s heavy quiet.

The smell of cooling asphalt rose from the street—that specific scent of sun-baked concrete finally releasing heat, mixed with rubber from tires and oil from cars and the faint ozone smell that came from too many electronics in too small a space.

I passed basketball court where Jack broke my nose was empty now—chain nets swaying in slight breeze, graffiti covering the backboards with territorial claims and declarations nobody cared about.

I could still see the exact spot where I’d fallen, where blood had dripped onto concrete and dried dark brown, where I’d learned that being smart didn’t protect you from being poor and being poor didn’t protect you from violence.