Chapter 439: Just... One of the Girls

"I know this doesn’t count for much, but I am sorry Phei, sorry for being exactly the person Harold raised me to be."

The sentence landed in the penthouse like a body hitting the floor.

Because that was it, wasn’t it? That was the architecture underneath all of it. Not cruelty for

cruelty’s

sake

. Not some innate

Victoria-shaped

evil

that had been born into her the way amethyst eyes had been born into Phei before he lost them.

She’d been

made

.

Constructed... he knew that much.

Harold Maxton had taken a girl and built a weapon out of her—taught her that power meant stepping on the people below you, that family meant hierarchy, that love was conditional and always, always had a price tag.

And she’d been his best student.

Better than Danton, who was too stupid to be cruel with precision. Better than Delilah, who’d inherited Melissa’s conscience and had to fight it every time she aimed. Better than Sienna, who’d opted out of the game entirely by disappearing into silence.

Victoria had been the one who excelled. Who took Harold’s lessons and perfected them. Who became, in every measurable way,

his daughter

—not by blood, as it turned out, not in the ways that mattered, but in the only way Harold had ever cared about.

She’d become his weapon.

And she’d pointed it at the easiest target in the house.

"I know none of that can be taken back,"

she said. Her voice was cracking now. The pre-law composure dissolving. The testimony becoming a confession. "I know saying sorry doesn’t undo ten years of me being—

of me choosing to be

—the worst version of myself to the one person in that house who couldn’t fight back."

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Delilah’s crewneck sleeve was too long and it caught the tears, and she looked,

for the first time since

Phei had known her, like a

nineteen-year-old

girl instead of a Legacy princess.

Young. Lost.

Standing in someone else’s clothes in someone else’s living room asking for something she hadn’t earned.

"I’m shameless to even be here. I know that."

Phei watched her. His arms stayed folded. His expression stayed neutral.

But something behind his eyes had shifted—a door that had been locked was now ajar, not fully open, just...

ajar.

Enough to let in light.

Not enough to walk through but at least enough for her words to slip through and her tears to be heard if they hit the floor as she stood outside that door.

"I was okay with it," Victoria continued, taking the opportunity before it fully closed. "With things going back to the way they were. Enemies, or whatever we were. Whatever you thought of me. I told myself that was fine. That I’d live with it. That I’d earned it."

She stopped. Swallowed. The next part cost her something—he could see the price being

extracted

in real time, the way her chin trembled, the way her chest moved on a breath that was too deep and too ragged for what should have been a sentence.

"And then

everything

happened."

Everything

was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Everything meant Harold beating Delilah. Meant the sky tearing open.

Meant being carried through a void portal out of the only home she’d ever known. Meant learning that her father had murdered her twin sister at birth and replaced her with a boy he’d made from another woman.

Meant the foundations of her entire identity—every memory, every relationship, every understanding of who she was and where she came from—being demolished in a single evening and replaced with rubble she was still trying to sort through.

"Mom. Sienna. Delilah. What we found out about... about the sister we never got to meet."

Her voice broke on

sister

.

Not cracked. Broke. The way glass breaks when the fracture has been there for days and it finally runs out of reasons to hold together.

"We had a sister, Phei. A real sister. A twin. And he—our father, the man who taught me how to ride a bike, who walked me to my first day of school, who sat at the head of the table every Christmas while I wrapped those shitty gifts for you—

he killed her

. He killed her before she drew her first breath and he replaced her with a boy and he looked our mother in the eye and lied for eighteen years and I—"

She couldn’t finish. The tears won. The composure, the testimony, the carefully

sequenced

apology—

all of it dissolved

into the raw, graceless, full-body grief of a girl whose father was a monster and whose family was in pieces and who had spent nineteen years being strong in all the wrong ways.

Because that was Victoria’s tragedy, wasn’t it?

She’d been strong. Genuinely strong. The eldest daughter carrying the weight of a family name that turned out to be built on infanticide and lies.

The girl who’d looked at Paradise and decided she’d be the best version of what it demanded—

beautiful, ruthless, untouchable

—without ever asking whether what Paradise demanded was worth becoming.

She’d been a pillar.

But she’s been a pillar holding up the wrong building.

And now the building was gone, and she was standing in its absence, holding nothing, realising she’d spent nineteen years bracing herself against a structure that never deserved her strength.

Phei unfolded his arms.

He didn’t move toward her. Didn’t reach out. Just unfolded his arms—let them drop to his sides, let the posture soften from guarded to listening. A small thing. A thing most people wouldn’t notice.

Victoria noticed.

"I should have been what Mom was," she said, quieter now. Emptied. The grief had hollowed her voice into something thin and honest. "For Sienna. For Delilah. I should have been the one holding them together instead of being another thing that fell apart and took an innocent boy with me. I’m the eldest. That was supposed to be my job. And instead I was—I was playing goddess on my own blood.

On you. My real blood

."

She looked at him. The same way he’d looked at her two minutes ago—past the surface, past the history, past the catalogue of sins and cruelties.

"Fine, we only share maternal blood from your side. I know the biology. I know the technicality. But after what happened—after learning what Harold did, after seeing what Mom carried alone for eighteen years, after watching Sienna try to figure out who she is when everything she thought she knew turned out to be a lie—I know exactly how precious that blood is. However much of it we share. However thin the thread."

1

She wiped her face again. Both hands this time. Pushing the tears away like they were obstacles between her and the thing she’d come here to say.

"Family isn’t what Harold taught me it was. It isn’t hierarchy. It isn’t who’s above and who’s below. It isn’t legacy or bloodline or fucking Christmas gifts. Family is the people who stay when everything falls apart. And

I—"

Her voice cracked one final time.

"I wasn’t one of those people.

But I want to be."

Silence.

The penthouse hummed around them. The refrigerator. The air system. The distant, muted pulse of a city that didn’t know or care that a girl was standing in a living room on the 98th floor breaking herself open in front of a boy she’d spent six years breaking down.

Phei looked at her.

He saw the weight she was carrying. Could measure it—not with the system, not with any ability, just with the experience of someone who’d carried weight his entire life and recognised the posture.

The shoulders that weren’t braced but bowed. The spine that was straight not from confidence but from the fear that if she let it curve even slightly she’d fold in half and never straighten again.

He saw the same pain that lived in Delilah’s silences. In Sienna’s thousand-yard stare. In the way Melissa held her coffee cup with both hands every morning—not for warmth but for something to grip.

The pain of a murdered sister none of them got to meet. A phantom limb on the family body. The girl who should have been at that table, who should have had a name and a face and a voice, who Harold had erased before any of them could love her.

Victoria carried that pain differently than her sisters. Delilah carried it in anger and grief. Sienna carried it in silence. Victoria carried it in the specific, grinding guilt of a girl who now knew she’d spent nineteen years being exactly what the man who killed her sister wanted her to be.

"Please.. forgive me..."

"Victoria."

She looked up. Mascara destroyed. Nose red. Delilah’s crewneck spotted with tears. The least

put-together

she’d ever been in front of another human being and somehow—somehow—the most honest.

"I’m not asking to be the

One,

Phei."

The words came out small. Final. The last round in a chamber she’d been loading for days.

"Just make me one of the girls."

A beat.

"Just one of your girls."

The girls don’t know how so less of Maxtons they have in their blood.