Chapter 386: Resurfacing of a Boy

Their thighs pressed against his—warm, soft, deliberate heat bleeding through the thin fabric of his pants. Victoria’s right leg draped half over his, the pleated skirt riding so high the black lace garter strap dug into the plush swell of her thigh, creating that obscene indent where flesh yielded and lace claimed.

Nastya’s left thigh mirrored it—full, trembling slightly, the stocking top biting deep enough that a faint red line already bloomed beneath the sheer black nylon.

Both skirts were hiked shamelessly, the short pleats fanned open like dark invitations, flashing the soaked black lace thongs beneath.

Phei didn’t flinch.

Even pinned between their bodies like a butterfly mounted for display—criminal skirts trapping him, heavy breasts brushing his arms with every breath, nipples hard and scraping through cropped hoodies—he just sat there.

Arms still spread wide across the back of the couch—which now framed them both, his forearms brushing the backs of their necks, fingers dangling close enough to tangle in violet-black and honey-brown hair if he chose.

Victoria’s long cascade spilled over his left wrist like spilled ink; Nastya’s loose waves settled against his right ribs, soft and warm and smelling faintly of expensive vanilla and danger.

Trap.

Obvious. Shameless. Beautifully executed.

Nastya moved first.

Her hand found his knee—light at first, casual, the way a girl touches someone she’s already decided belongs to her.

Except Nastya Romano had never touched him before in his entire life. Her green eyes tilted up through the edge of her hood—

bright, vivid, almost gentle

—and the smile she gave him was warm in a way that felt real. Which made it infinitely more dangerous than if it had been fake.

"Hell of a game tonight," she murmured. "I’ve never seen anything like the air walk. Nobody has."

Her fingers traced a slow circle on his knee. Lazy.

Unhurried.

The touch of a girl who had all night and intended to use every second of it to unravel him.

Victoria took the opposite approach.

She leaned in—body turning,

one thick thigh sliding higher

over his until the garter strap pulled taut and snapped faintly against her skin.

The movement put her face close enough to his jaw that he felt the heat of her breath, smelled the faint rose-metal of her perfume mixed with the raw scent of her arousal already soaking through the thong beneath her skirt.

"You know," she whispered—dark, rich, designed to vibrate in the spaces between a man’s thoughts—"I made a

lot

of money betting on you tonight."

Her hand landed on his chest. Fingers splaying wide, palm flat, feeling his heartbeat through the shirt with the

proprietary

confidence.

"

A lot

of money."

Nastya’s thumb drew another circle on his knee. Higher this time. The hem of intent creeping upward until her fingertips brushed the inner seam of his pants, grazing the thick vein that pulsed along the underside of his cock.

Victoria’s fingers curled slightly against his chest—nails dragging, light enough to tease, deliberate enough to be unmistakable. The cropped hoodie rode higher with the movement, exposing more of her toned stomach—flat, smooth, flushed pink at the edges where arousal had spread upward from her dripping cunt.

Two girls.

Both’s intentions transparent as glass.

And both—

if Phei was being

honest

with himself, which he sometimes was when the alternative was

self-delusion

—were working

better

than they had any right to.

Nastya laughed at something he hadn’t said. Quiet and warm, that made her green eyes crinkle and turned her face into something that belonged in the good wing of a museum.

"You know what’s funny?" She shifted closer—not aggressively, just...

closer

. Her thigh pressed fully against his now, the stocking top digging deeper into soft flesh, the garter strap pulling taut enough to leave a fresh red line.

"I watched you for months at the academy. You were invisible. Everyone just... looked right through you. And I always wondered—

how

? How does everyone miss

this

?"

She gestured at him. All of him. The gesture encompassed his face, his shoulders, the white hair catching crimson light, the thick bulge straining against his pants where her fingers had already begun to trace.

"Because I saw you," she said simply. "Even when nobody else did back then."

And the thing was—

The thing that made Nastya Romano dangerous in a way Victoria’s aggression could never match—

She might have been telling the truth.

The

Dominance Aura, the Compelling Gaze, the Perfect Addiction

passive—all of those could manufacture desire from thin air, spin attraction from nothing, turn a glance into obsession.

But none of them could make someone say

I saw you

and mean it. None of them could fabricate the quiet conviction in those green eyes, the steadiness of her voice, the way she wasn’t performing for an audience of one but simply...

telling him something she’d been carrying.

1

Phei felt something shift in his chest. Small. Warm. The part of him that was still a boy who’d been invisible for seventeen years hearing a pretty girl say she’d noticed him before anyone else had. Before he became what he was now.

Lying bitch much, huh?

Victoria read the shift.

Victoria had always been a predator of emotions—she could smell vulnerability the way sharks smelled blood. She leaned in closer. Lips nearly touching his ear now, breath hot against skin that still carried traces of the Void-Ice cold.

"I bet

everything

on you," she whispered. Not about the game anymore. The words carrying weight that exceeded their literal meaning, loaded with a significance she wanted him to feel even if she’d never spell it out.

Her hand on his chest pressed firmer. Feeling his heartbeat. Counting it.

"

Everything

, Phei."

From the dance floor, Sierra had stopped moving.

She’d clocked the two girls flanking him the instant they’d sat down—because Sierra Montgomery missed nothing that happened within a fifty-foot radius of her man—and for the past moments she’d been watching with the focused attention of a woman cataloguing potential threats and their elimination timelines.

Maddie had noticed too. So had Delilah, and Maya, and Amber.

They were all watching.

And they could all see something that surprised them.

It was

working

.

Not the way it worked on other men—the performative seduction, the calculated touches, the pretty words designed to disarm.

This was different.

Nastya’s warmth was getting in. Phei’s shoulders had relaxed a fraction. When Nastya had said

I saw you

, something behind his eyes had flickered—something vulnerable.

The

boy underneath

was listening.

Even Victoria—Victoria with her hand on his heart, Victoria with her whispered

everything

—even she was landing. Not because her technique was good (it was) or because her body was devastating (it was) but because she was... his

family?

However broken, however poisoned, however much history lay between them like a minefield, Victoria Maxton shared his blood through

Melissa

his woman now.

There was a part of Phei—

a small, stupid, stubbornly hopeful part that should have died years ago but refused to

—that wanted his family to love him.

Had always wanted it.

Even when they gave him every reason to stop.

For

half a second

—barely there, a ghost of a ghost—Phei almost let it happen.

Almost leaned into Nastya’s warmth. Almost let Victoria’s hand stay on his chest.

Almost

allowed himself to believe that the eldest Maxton daughter could

touch

him with something other than

cruelty,

that the girl who’d spent years

dismantling

him piece by piece had come here tonight to build something instead.

Half a second.

Then the memories came.

All at once

.

Like a dam breaking. Like someone had taken every

moment of pain

Victoria had ever inflicted on him and compressed them into a single bullet and fired it directly into the warm thing Nastya’s words had coaxed open in his chest.

The basement nights. The locked doors. The way she’d watched while others hurt him and done nothing. The way she’d smiled when he bled. The way she’d called him

nothing

like it was a fact instead of an insult.

Each one a scalpel. Each one delivered with that same warm, pretty smile she was giving him right now—the one that looked like kindness from the outside and tasted like poison from the inside.

The warmth in Phei’s chest didn’t cool.

It froze.

Solid. Instant. Sealing it shut,

entombing,

and what grew in its place was something older and colder and infinitely more dangerous than anything the

Void-Ice

had ever produced.

Because the

Void-Ice

was power.

This was

hate

.

It had grown in the soil of a thousand small cruelties watered by years of silence and fertilised by the specific betrayal of being hurt by someone who was supposed to be family.

He could understand Nastya. Girl had

never done anything

to him. Never lifted a finger against him, never said a cruel word, never looked at him like he was something scraped off the bottom of a designer shoe.

Nastya Romano was here because she wanted to be, and whatever her motivations—curiosity, attraction, the gravitational pull of his aura and his

Stole

and his everything?—they were clean.

But Victoria?

Victoria Maxton was the cruelest person Phei had ever known.

Not Danton. Not Harold. Not Brett or any of the Legacy boys who’d beaten him and mocked him and made his life a waking nightmare for three years.

Victoria.

Phei could overlook some. Heck, he had already

overlapped

it with Delilah—somehow, impossibly, had looked at a girl who’d been part of the machine that ground him down and found something

worth loving

underneath.

Victoria was different.

Victoria had been

surgical

.

She’d been his training ground. His introduction to real cruelty—

The eldest Maxton daughter, the one everyone said was

so accomplished

,

so put-together

,

so impressive

—

Guys, pay attention to that... Nastya’s attraction to Phei is more than a Princess wanting a piece of him. You’ll find out.