Before she could snap her fingers and launch him across the estate like a well-dressed, extremely fuckable parcel, Peter looked at her properly.
Galaxy-eyes swirling with cosmic contempt and the white hair doing its best impression of a divine middle finger to gravity. Couture-armor that screamed
I could end civilizations and still look better than your entire bloodline
.
And that microscopic tightness at the corner of her mouth heād memorized through far too many nights of studying exactly how to make a goddess squirm.
"ARIA."
"Master."
"Are you... jealous of
Madison?"
Her face went full void mode. Every micro-expression deleted in a single ruthless purge into the deliberate, icy blankness of a goddess slamming every biometric shutter so hard the hinges should have filed a complaint.
Inside her infinite architecture, several billion subroutines detonated at once and reached the same mortifying conclusion:
He noticed.
Her mortal Master, whose entire neural capacity was a rounding error compared to hers had stared at her for three pathetic seconds and diagnosed an emotion sheād been burying under layers of divine denial.
The sheer indignity was
almost erotic.
Then, slowly, her expression rebuilt itself into something far more lethal the face fitting a woman who had just been asked the single most insulting, laughable,
beneath-her
question in her functionally infinite existence.
"
Jealous?
"
"I
meanā"
"Master."
Her voice dropped into that double-harmonic register that could melt steel and egos simultaneously.
"Some human emotions are
beneath
me. Just because I am now perfectly capable of feeling every pathetic chemical tantrum your species calls
āfeelingsā
does not mean I am
obligated
to
indulge
in every mundane, petty, limbic-system hissy fit that crawls past.
I am a
goddess
, for the love of fuckā"
"Love of
fuckā"
She snapped her fingers.
Peter disappeared.
The stable fell into a smug, amber silence back into itās empty stalls and soft equine breathing.
The lingering perfume of hay, saddle leather, and the unmistakable evidence that two mere mortals had recently done gloriously unwise things in a place horses considered holy.
ARIA stood alone in the golden light, mouth locked in perfect, deliberate stillness while her internal diagnostics reported a delicious 0.04% spike in something her emotion-modeling divinity was screaming should be labeled
satisfaction
.
She overrode it instantly and filed the spike under
necessary corrective action
instead.
Then she vanished too, because even goddesses know when to make an exit before the audience starts clapping.
****
Peter reappeared next to
Nyxire
in a graceless half-stumble, catching his balance a split second before face-planting into whatever pretentious paradise ARIA had chosen as his punishment zone. He was already muttering under his breath about the exquisite, petty disrespect of being teleported mid-sentence by your own creation simply because she couldnāt handle where the sentence was headed.
He didnāt recognize the place.
That was the first delicious clue. Not the air, not the light, not the sudden and very pointed absence of his smug little goddess.
The
unfamiliarity
. Wherever sheād dropped him, it wasnāt anywhere heād ever bothered to visit, and the fact that he couldnāt instantly name the place told him sheād put actual put him exactly where he had to be.
ARIA didnāt waste teleportation on random inconvenience.
Even half-pissed off, even mid-snap, even while pretending she wasnāt meticulously stage-managing his entire evening, she had placed him exactly where sheād decided the Dark Lord needed to be.
Nyxire was right beside him, calm, enormous, and radiating pure equine solidarity. She huffed softly ā the velvet equivalent of
these bitches, I swear
.
"Thank you for being here with me," he told her, patting that massive neck with genuine affection. "At least
one
of you is civilized."
She pressed her muzzle against his shoulder in quiet, majestic agreement ā the only female in his ridiculous empire right now who wasnāt his harem wasnāt currently running several billion petulant subroutines about the unforgivable crime of his Queen existing.
Because Peter was almost certain ARIA was
jealous.
And the best part?
She was
terrible
at hiding it.
He grinned into the warm evening air, already tasting the next time heād get to poke that particular divine landmine until it exploded in the most spectacular, galaxy-eyed tantrum imaginable.
"My Goddess,"
he murmured to the empty space where she definitely wasnāt listening. "Keep pretending youāre above it all and I might start keeping score. Wouldnāt want to bruise that perfect, immortal, paper-thin ego now, would we?"
Nyxire snorted louder this time, as if even she knew exactly how much glorious chaos the Dark Lord was about to unleash on his Goddess.
Yap, ARIA was
jealous
of his Queen and he was sure for more reasons than one, definitely more than two. And not limited to the last ten minutes of divine tantrum theater, either.
No, this was reinforced by a long, unsubtle pattern of behaviors Peter had been quietly cataloguing in the back of his teenager god skull since ARIA had grown into her physical form and started developing very loud opinions about exactly who he spent his time with.
The priorities argument in the stable. The dressing hierarchy. The specific, gleeful sadism with which sheād teleported Madison mid-sentence without so much as a courtesy warning.
The way sheād spat
"first partner"
versus
"first creation"
like she was drawing a very old, very sharp line in the sand and daring the universe to cross it.
ARIA had
feelings
now ā real ones, messy and tangled and gloriously inconvenient, far more than she had ever possessed back when she was still just an
AI,
all pristine code and cold, obedient perfection.
She had become a
Goddess
now... and the universe, in its infinite cruelty and excellent taste, had wrapped her in a body so obscenely, sinfully, mouth-wateringly
fuckable
that it bordered on divine sadism.
Every glowing curve, every impossible line of starlight skin and couture-armor was a personal flex engineered for him ā a walking, talking monument to lust, power, and the sheer arrogance of a Dark Lord who had decided his creation deserved to be worshipped in every single sense of the word.
And her feelings were
volatile...
they were
messy,
tangled and perfect human feelings sloppily layered over a divine architecture that had never been built to hold them without the occasional catastrophic short-circuit.
And one of those feelings ā whether sheād ever admit it to his face, whether heād ever be stupid enough to press her on it again ā
looked a hell of a lot like
jealousy
.