Chapter 547: A GILF! Arrival of HER!

Next to Harold sat an old man. Sixties, maybe. Hard to pin down with Legacy men — they aged like that expensive leather armchair nobody sits in because it’s

"for show"

: slow, superficially distinguished, hiding whatever dry rot and structural weakness lurked beneath the polished surface.

Phei recognized the face instantly from the hallway portraits — those stern-faced Maxton patriarchs stretching back like a disapproving conga line through time.

Harold’s father

. Cassiopeia’s father.

The previous patriarch.

The man whose eyes held the sharp, unyielding gaze of someone who’d spent a lifetime being obeyed and saw no

earthly reason

to break that habit now.

And beside the grandfather...

ah~

Here we were.

The woman next to the old man was, according to brutal arithmetic, in her sixties. But math, as we all know, is a filthy liar when confronted with Legacy genetics.

Nothing about her screamed "sixty." She was slim and tall and in a body that shared

Cassiopeia’s exact blueprint

— identical bone structure, those dangerously elegant curves that Legacy blood apparently preserved like vintage Bordeaux in a climate-controlled vault that also, inexplicably, shrugged off aging, gravity, and basic human decency.

A GILF

rig

ht

t

here.

Phei said it in his head.

His brain scrambled for a euphemism —

"timeless allure,"

"ageless sophistication"

— but came up empty because sometimes the truth is brutally, beautifully simple:

three consonants, one vowel, and move the fuck on.

She was

radiator-hot.

The quiet, old-money kind of hot where effort and performance were foreign concepts, and the mere fact of her presence made the entire room collectively exhale in grateful relief.

And Phei — because his wiring was catastrophically flawed and he’d made peace with this particular brand of dysfunction years ago — immediately wondered what it would feel like to officially make Harold his

stepson

in every meaningful, carnal, socially disruptive sense and

cuckold

the old man.

To claim this woman. To render Harold not just nephew, but stepson via the most intimate form of family reconfiguration imaginable.

Terrible thought, Phei. Horrifyingly inappropriate. So deeply in my character it almost hurt.

The

grandmother

GILF refused to be ignored.

Her eyes locked onto Phei the instant he crossed the threshold, tracking him across the room with the laser focus of a woman who’d spent years fielding admiring glances and was now, for the first time in an age, delightfully on the

receiving end.

Her gaze descended slowly — lingering on his chest, his broad shoulders, his hands — then

ascended

again with the unhurried satisfaction of someone who’d spotted their favorite dish on the menu and was merely waiting for the waiter to stop faffing and take their order.

Phei let his abilities work their quiet magic. Not the full room-clearing blast. Just the ambient

hum~

The passive radiation.

Cool Aura

doing its subtle pull.

Cuckolding Stole

cranking the amplifier to eleven.

Something ancient and insistent fired in his blood, because he caught the unmistakable scent of her

arousal

cutting through the room’s stale air... that faint, expensive, and aged smell of her leaking pussy and utterly in keeping with the rest of her aura.

Horny. Horny. Grandma

. He hummed to himself.

Eira chose that exact moment to unleash a fit of laughter inside his skull so violent it made his eye twitch.

He felt the traitorous urge to grin and suppressed it with the iron will of a man who’d survived longer than expected by not smiling at

inappropriate junctures.

Phei settled into his seat.

To his right sat Melissa, rigid as a steel rod. The three sisters fanned out beside him and her like poorly disciplined troops. Phei sat dead center, directly across from Harold, who wore his recent facial renovations like a badge of dishonorable combat.

Phei met his uncle’s ruined gaze and grinned. Not kindly. Not sympathetically either but exactly of a boy who remembered very clearly how he’d earned those particular souvenirs.

"Long time no see, uncle."

The grandfather cleared his throat. Short. Sharp. The universal sound of an old man saying

"Boy, I will end you"

without actually opening his mouth, and also get off my lawn.

"Grumpy!"

Phei said, leaning back in his chair like he owned the damn place. "I was just greeting my

beloved

uncle. Is that not allowed anymore? Has familial affection been banned while I was away?

Did I miss the memo?"

Victoria made a sound behind her hand that suspiciously resembled a stifled snort. Delilah didn’t bother hiding her laugh — she just let it out, bright and sharp, and Harold’s jaw tightened another dangerous degree, like a garage door slowly grinding shut on someone’s fingers.

Harold said nothing. What was there to say? What do you say to the boy who beat your face in,

fucked your wife

, soul-branded your sister — even though he din’t knoiw that part yet — and was now sitting across from you grinning like you were frat brothers who’d missed the last ten reunions?

You say nothing. You sit there. You take it. And you pray to whatever god listens to the

profoundly embarrassed

that he doesn’t bring up anything specific —

like, oh, I don’t know, the exact pressure he applied to your trachea or the particular vintage of wine that soaked into your sister’s sheets.

Cassiopeia arrived late.

She walked in looking like a woman who had most certainly not been getting

plowed

in a sunken pool twenty minutes ago and slid onto the Maxton side of the table — because that’s where she belonged, technically, officially, on paper and in blood.

What the family didn’t know, what nobody at this table could possibly know except the grinning dragon sitting directly across from Harold and deliberately facing her brother like it was some kind of twisted seating-chart foreplay,

was that Cassiopeia had nothing left of theirs

.

Her soul was branded. Her loyalty was rewritten. She belonged to Phei in every cell, every thought, every flicker of intent now chirping happily on his personal frequency.

Phei didn’t ask where

Danton

was.

He didn’t need to. The boy was here. Somewhere in this mansion’s labyrinthine guts, sulking in whatever

chamber

a

recently-awakened-from-ancient-slumber

prince occupies when he can’t be bothered to attend his own family reunion.

Too good for the table. Too smart. Or too...

whatever Danton had become these days.

Phei still didn’t have a full read on his cousin’s current incarnation that even his newly claimed aunt didn’t know how powerful he was, and it pissed him off more than he’d admit to anyone except maybe Eira, who would undoubtedly laugh at his distress.

But he could feel him. Oh yeah. A gaze drilling into his back from somewhere deep in the building’s bowels. Heavy. Patient. Like being watched by something that had already decided you were a fascinating lab rat and was in zero hurry to explain why.

Phei chuckled under his breath and sent a silent middle finger in the direction of that gaze.

Danton

received

it loud and clear.

The weight shifted. Amusement, not anger. Like a big cat watching a smaller cat throw a hissy fit and deciding the whole spectacle was

kind of precious.

Later,

that weight rumbled.

Not today, little dragon. But later.

Phei added it to the list. The list of people, things, and apocalyptic pests he’d eventually have to deal with. It was getting distressingly long. He might actually need a spreadsheet. Or a therapist.

The doors opened again.

Two women walked in.

The first— the one leading — moved fast. Too fast for basic human courtesy and the room’s already tense atmosphere and the poor the assistant behind her who was practically power-walking in stilettos to keep pace.

She crossed the threshold and the air didn’t just change — it fucking assaulted her... like literally.

The actual atmosphere in the room grew thin and sharp and cold, like someone had opened a portal to Antarctica’s break room and forgotten to close it.

Every person at the table felt it.

The grandfather snapped upright like a

jack-in-the-box.

Harold’s fingers curled into claws.

The grandmother’s delicious

arousal-flush

drained instantly, replaced by something pale and wary, like she’d just remembered she left the oven on. Even Cassiopeia — who’d been rewired by a dragon less than two hours ago and thought she understood what power felt like — went utterly still, her spine locking like a struck match.

Phei watched the woman walk.

She is—

He didn’t have a word for what she was.

She moved like a flawless blade sheathed in Savile Row, each step landing with the precision of a neurosurgeon who’d never once second-guessed where to put her scalpel.

Her Japanese features carved sharp enough to shave with and her eyes that held zero warmth and all the judgment of a disappointed god.

But she was also a beauty that only lost to the Ashford Madam.

"Melissa,"

Phei murmured, voice low enough that only she could hear over the sudden arctic blast.

"Who the hell is that?"

Melissa smiled but not her usual warm, knowing, maternal grin she gave him when he was being cleverly absurd, nor the sharp, amused smirk she deployed when he was being gloriously stupid.

It looked like she’d been waiting for this exact moment since the Cretaceous period and was now savoring every second like it was a rare, aged whiskey.

"That,"

Melissa said, letting each word land like a carefully placed domino, "is one of your

grandmother’s harem members."

She paused for maximum effect.

"She’s here for you."