Chapter 438: Blood Of My Blood

Phei came down the spiral staircase in a light gray suit that had no business looking that good on a seventeen-year-old.

Slim-cut. Modern.

The jacket slightly oversized in the shoulders the way expensive tailoring allowed—not sloppy, just easy, like the suit had been built around the concept of a boy who didn’t try and didn’t need to.

White crew-neck tee underneath instead of a dress shirt because he wasn’t going to a board meeting, he was going on a date, and the tee sat clean against his collarbones in a way that made formality feel like a waste of everyone’s time.

Cropped trousers, no socks, white leather shoes that probably cost more than a semester’s textbook budget.

A thin silver bracelet on one wrist—the only jewellery he wore now, the only jewellery he needed for today.

He looked like money that had never worried about money. Like a man magazines invented and reality forgot to delete.

He was halfway down the glass treads—third floor to second, the spiral catching the evening light through the windows and painting amber stripes across the steps—when he stopped.

Victoria

was in his living room.

She was pacing—slow,

hip-swaying

circuit of a girl who understood that walking was a performance and she was always on stage.

Gods, this girl’s thickness was on the other level... sometimes it made him want to forget everyhting and

just

have

her as she wants him to.

To make her even more tempting to the eyes that was into the innocents and nervous ones, like his taste... she was biting her nails.

Victoria Maxton—the girl who had once told Phei to his face that she’d call the police if he ever spoke to her without being spoken to first—was

gnawing

on her thumbnail like a

caffeinated squirrel

waiting for its court summons.

Her hair was down like she’d washed it and let it dry and hadn’t thought about it since, which for Victoria was the equivalent of showing up naked. She wore leggings and an oversized crewneck that wasn’t hers—it was Delilah’s, Phei could tell by how stretched it was on her voluptous figure.

And the fact that Victoria wearing her younger sister’s clothes said more about her current state than anything her mouth could.

She hadn’t heard him yet.

Phei stood on the stairs and watched her pace. Back and forth. Past the sectional, past the obsidian coffee table, past the windows where the city was going gold with sunset.

Her reflection moved in the glass—a girl arguing with herself, losing on both sides.

He could leave, tell Eira to teleport him out, avoid this entirely. Patricia was waiting. The evening was planned.

Victoria and whatever she was carrying could wait for a day when he had fewer things to do and more patience to burn.

But he didn’t leave.

Because he’d seen that pace before. Not on Victoria—on Delilah. On Melissa. On himself, in rooms nobody knew he was in, walking the same three metres of floor over and over because the thing inside his chest was too big to sit with and too heavy to carry and movement was the only compromise his body would accept.

It was maybe a thing that ran in Tiamats?

Victoria turned.

Saw him.

Froze.

For three seconds, neither of them spoke.

Victoria’s hand dropped from her mouth. Her eyes went wide—not at the suit, not at the way he looked, but at the simple fact of being caught. Being seen mid-pace.

Mid-nail-bite.

Mid-whatever-the-fuck

she’d been doing in his living room while his family was out her hoping to ambush him into confessions.

"Phei."

"Victoria."

Her jaw worked. Muscles moving under the skin of her throat. Swallowing something that wanted to come out and wasn’t being allowed to yet.

"Can we talk?"

Phei continued down the stairs. Slow. Unhurried.

He reached the first floor and picked up his phone from the marble surface where he’d left it charging.

"There’s nothing to talk about," he said.

Not cruel. Not cold. Just... factual. The voice of a man who had reviewed the available topics of conversation between himself and Victoria Maxton and found the list empty.

"Phei—"

"I have somewhere to be."

"I know. I know you do. I’ve been waiting here because I knew you’d come down eventually and I knew if I called you’d ignore it and if I texted you’d leave me on read and if I asked Delilah to arrange something you’d say yes and then not show up because

that’s what I would do if I were you and I—"

She stopped herself. The sentence had been running away from her.

Right now, as far as Phei could see, she was a woman whose architecture had collapsed and was speaking from the rubble.

"Please," she said.

Phei looked at her.

Not the way he’d looked at her for the past three weeks—the cold, the predator evaluating whether the target was worth the energy—he looked at her the way you look at someone when you stop

seeing what they’ve done and start seeing what they are.

She was thinner than usual. Not dramatically—not weight loss that alarmed people—but enough. The crewneck hung differently than it would have two weeks ago.

Her collarbones were more pronounced. Her cheeks had lost the fullness that had always made her look younger than nineteen, leaving behind something sharper, more angular, closer to the bone.

She hadn’t been eating well.

He knew the look. Had worn it for ten years. Had seen it in the mirror every morning of his old life—the face of someone whose body had decided that food was optional because the thing eating them from inside wasn’t hunger, it was something that couldn’t be fed.

He put the phone down.

"Five minutes," he said.

Victoria didn’t sit. Couldn’t sit. The pacing had stopped but the energy was still there—vibrating in her hands, in her jaw, in the way she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other like the floor was hot.

"I’m sorry."

Two words. She said them and then stood there like she’d just handed him a grenade and was waiting to see if he’d throw it back.

Phei leaned, arms folded. His face gave her nothing.

"For what?"

It wasn’t a genuine question. He knew for what. They both knew for what.

But he was going to make her say it, because the last years of his life had been built on a foundation of people who hurt him and never named what they’d done, and he was done accepting apologies that didn’t come with an itemised receipt.

Victoria’s eyes closed. When they opened, they were wet.

"For calling you a charity case at Thanksgiving dinner when you were twelve. In front of everyone. While you were eating."

Phei said nothing.

"For telling Danton it was fine to take your room. That you didn’t need a real one. That the one next to the laundry was ’enough for someone like him.’"

Phei said nothing.

"For the paintball incident. For laughing when you came inside with welts the size of eggs and Delilah was still shooting at you through the back door. For recording it. For showing it to my friends."

Phei said nothing.

"For every time I walked past you in the hall and pretended you were invisible. For every family dinner where I talked over you. For every Christmas where I made sure your gift was the worst one—deliberately, specifically, I chose the worst thing I could find and wrapped it beautifully because I wanted you to feel the hope of a nice package and the disappointment of what was inside. Every year. For ten years."

Her voice was steady.

But her hands were shaking, and the tears that had been building in her lashes finally broke—not dramatically, not the cinematic

single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek

that girls in movies deployed.

These were the messy kind. The kind that came with snot and blotchy skin and the specific ugliness of a woman who’d been holding something too heavy for too long and had finally lost her grip.

She looked like she’d been hit by a truck full of regret and then backed over for good measure.

Phei smiled at how she choose the least of the things she did to him, not because she wasn’t sincere but because she didn’t want him to revisit them with the person who did them to him.

Emotional intelligence my friends.

Phei tilted his head, just a fraction. The smallest crack in the armor.

She looked like she’d been hit by a truck full of regret and then backed over for good measure.

"You rehearsed that list,"

he said quietly.

Victoria gave a wet, broken laugh that sounded more like a hiccup.

"I’ve had nights to memorize it. Figured I should get the order right when I finally had the guts to say it out loud."

She wiped at her face with the sleeve of Delilah’s sweatshirt—smearing mascara and tears into a tragic abstract painting—and looked at him like she was waiting for the guillotine to drop.

Phei exhaled through his nose. Not quite a sigh. Closer to surrender.

"You’re still wearing Delilah’s hoodie like it’s emotional body armor," he said, voice low, almost amused despite himself.

"That’s new."

Victoria glanced down at herself as if just remembering she was wearing it.

"It smells like her shampoo," she mumbled. "And... I don’t know.

Comfort?

I stole it from her laundry basket before you came from the gym, like a common criminal. She’s going to kill me when she finds out."

A ghost of a smile flickered across Phei’s mouth—gone so fast Victoria almost missed it.

"She’ll survive," he said. "You, on the other hand..."

He let the sentence hang. Not cruel. Just honest.

Victoria swallowed hard.

"I know I don’t deserve forgiveness," she said. "I’m not asking for it. I just... needed you to hear it. All of it.

Before I lose the nerve forever.

"