Chapter 378: The Crimson Eden Noire

When Phei really sat with it—longer than two seconds, longer than the quick mental shrug he usually gave most things—it was fucking

hilarious

.

He’d never actually been to a club.

Not to dance much less to drink pretending he wasn’t

miserable

while everyone else pretended they were having the time of their goddamn lives.

He’d been dragged to plenty of places in the last few weeks with

Sierra and Maddie

—restaurants where the menu didn’t list prices because if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford the oxygen inside, rooftop bars where the cocktails tasted like expensive sin and the city glittered below like it was putting on a private show just for them.

He’d

fucked

in bathrooms, because Maddie was a walking chaos gremlin who treated public

indecency

the way normal people treated brushing their teeth:

routine, shameless, ideally twice a day and with zero remorse.

Those nights had been

good

. Great, even. Easily the best stretch of his life so far—and that bar was low, considering the previous record-holder was probably the

forty-eight-hour

period where nobody had

punched

him in the

face.

But an actual

club

as a new Phei?

Never.

The closest he’d ever come was back when he was still the

charity-case

ghost—

He’d lurked in the edges of those places, not to party.

To

spy

.

To watch the Main Legacy boys from the shadows, clock their patterns, file away habits and weaknesses because when you had zero money, zero family, zero future, the only currency nobody could take from you was information.

Fun fucking times.

But now—

Now here he stood.

Hair still damp from the post-game shower, body still buzzing with the leftover static of walking on literal

air

in front of twenty thousand screaming people.

White strands catching the violent neon bleed from the building’s facade—crimson, obviously, because subtlety had been taken out back and shot years ago.

The Crimson Eden Noire.

Phei sighed. Long. Slow. The kind of sigh that carried the weight of someone who’d just realised his life had officially jumped the shark.

He’d pictured

"after-party"

as something sane. A penthouse. A rented hotel floor. A vibe. Not...

this

.

Emily Hartwell had booked them the single most exclusive, most aggressively VIP nightclub on the planet.

Less than twenty-four hours from challenge announcement to game to this.

He turned to her.

Emily shrugged.

One shoulder lift-drop. Surgical. It said: Don’t ask. I won’t tell. Move on.

"Emily."

"Phei."

"The challenge dropped

yesterday

. The game was

today

. That’s—" He did the math again. The math was still insulting. "—not even twenty-four hours. For

this

."

He gestured at the

monolith

behind them. Velvet ropes thick enough to hang a man. Bouncers who looked like they’d been carved from obsidian and bad decisions. The line of

hopefuls

snaking around the block—every single one dressed like money and none of them getting in tonight.

Emily’s face didn’t flicker. That crisp, terrifyingly competent assistant mask locked in place.

"Don’t be dramatic. It’s nothing big." She said it the way people say

"it’s just a paper cut"

about wounds that need stitches and a tetanus shot.

"The

PheiCrush Simps

contain an obscene concentration of Downtown Paradise’s richest girls. You can’t seriously expect less. Getting your win celebrated at the Crimson Eden Noire is—" She paused, searching for the perfect shade of dismissal. "—

Tuesday

for them."

"It’s not Tuesday."

"It is when your pocket money could buy a small country and still have change for the tip. Can we go inside now?"

He turned.

Twenty-something girls—maybe thirty—clustered loose behind Emily. The core PheiCrush Simps who’d shown up tonight, a sliver of the army that now numbered in the hundreds and was growing faster than his brain could comfortably track.

Every single one of them was staring at him.

Those eyes.

Bright. Dreamy. Adoring in a way that twisted something in his chest—not bad, not uncomfortable, just...

complicated

.

Gratitude and worship and the flushed, breathless high of girls who’d watched him walk on air an hour ago and were still processing that the boy they’d bet everything on—the one every Legacy prince had dismissed as trash—had just doubled the score against five of the best players Paradise had ever produced.

Most of them had walked away with hundreds of thousands tonight. First money they’d ever

earned

.

Not dropped by parents who used cash to buy silence instead of love. Money they’d won because they’d believed in something the whole city laughed at.

He didn’t know most of their names. Didn’t know their families, their private hells, the flavour of gilded cage each of them carried behind those perfect smiles.

But he knew what they’d done today.

The cheer competition they’d deliberately

tanked.

The bets they’d doubled down on when Emily gave the signal.

The raw, reckless, beautiful courage it took to stand in a stadium full of Legacy royalty wearing shirts that screamed

PHEICRUSH SIMPS

.

"Thank you," he said.

Two words. No speech. No theatrics. Just that—quiet, direct, every syllable meant.

The blush that rolled through the group could’ve lit half the block.

Emily’s hand closed around his wrist.

"Inside.

Now

. Before they start fainting and we have to explain

mass hysteria

to security."

She pulled. He let her.

The bouncers felt him before they saw him.

That same animal

flinch

every big man did around him now—the lizard brain screaming

predator

before higher thought could catch up.

The passive Dominance Aura rolled off him in thick waves tonight, heavier than usual, cranked up by the game, by the airwalk, by whatever the fuck his bloodline had finally decided to wake up and start doing to his body.

Two mountains in black suits—men who bench-pressed luxury cars for fun and hadn’t been scared of another human since middle school—took one look at him and stepped aside like they’d been given orders from God.

That frost-edged thing he still couldn’t control properly wrapped the entrance like winter had decided to drop by unannounced. Breath didn’t quite fog, but it was close. The bouncers shivered without knowing why.

Phei nodded to them as he passed. Short. Polite. Because whatever monster he was turning into, he wasn’t going to be the prick who ignored working men standing in the cold for a living.

The line caught him for half a second—heads snapping, mouths falling open, the collective inhale of twenty strangers simultaneously registering something their brains couldn’t label.

Some had been at the game. He saw it in their eyes—the recognition, the disbelief, the

holy-shit-did-I-really-watch-a-seventeen-year-old-walk-on-air-today

look that had probably been looping across faces all over Paradise since the whistle.

Emily yanked him through the entrance before anyone could do more than stare.

Then they were inside.

Bass hit like a physical thing—deep, relentless, rattling ribs and teeth. Crimson light bled from every surface. Darkness that cost money. Bodies already grinding in the shadows like the night had a deadline.

Phei knew—

bone-deep

, no question—that today was going to be one of the

longest, wildest, most dangerous

days of his life.

And it had only just started.