Chapter 550: For Known and Unknown Reasons

The room didn’t just go quiet—it froze.

The actual temperature nosedived. The air turned blade-sharp, winter-sharp, the kind of cold that sneaks into Harold’s lungs and gave them a stern talking-to. It then pressed down on the table, the chairs, every

soul

in the room—but laser-focused on Harold.

Like gravity had singled him out and whispered,

You owe me for existing.

"And you’ll realize

how

insignificant

an ant you are,

you child-killing scum."

Harold choked in a wet, ugly, hacking convulsion that sounded like his lungs were staging a jailbreak through his trachea.

Blood exploded

across the table—vivid crimson on dark wood, tiny flecks landing on the very papers Rune had just shoved at him.

Phei leaned back in his chair.

He was not horrified. He registered this about himself with some mild interest.

By any reasonable metric, a man coughing blood across a conference table should have produced horror, or alarm, or at minimum concern for the man in question—but what Phei was experiencing was something much simpler and much harder to justify to a medical professional.

He was just. Disgusted.

Phei looked at Rune.

Rune had not moved. This was—he took a moment to appreciate this—genuinely extraordinary.

He looked at Harold.

"Dude!" Phei wheezed, recoiling as if slapped with a wet fish. "That’s disgusting!"

Melissa and the girls looked at him with the specific expression of someone who had just watched a person react to a house fire by complaining about the smell of smoke.

Profound. Dumfounded look that said,

Says the man whose near-death experience with Harold wasn’t even two weeks old.

Phei, for his part, was not particularly moved by the

inheritance

either.

He was aware he should be.

He was aware that somewhere in the room there existed a correct emotional reaction to learning you were about to receive several companies, a pharmaceutical empire, and a real estate portfolio—and that the reaction probably involved something more than

hm~

and a return to staring at the lawyer.

But here was the thing about growing up

Ryujin Tiamat

, even accidentally, even from a distance, even while being materially poor in the specific humiliating way that only happened when you were poor

adjacent

to obscene wealth:

The numbers stopped working on you

.

Why would he be surprised?

Although Phei had struggled with money for the last ten years, scraping by on part-time jobs and later Melissa’s card—he used with the guilt of a man borrowing from a friend and the resentment of a man who knew, distantly, that he shouldn’t have needed to.

The particular misery of being rich by blood and broke by circumstance.

Knowing somewhere in the

abstract

that your family had money the way the ocean had water not as a quantity but as a condition of its existence—

and still checking your pockets before ordering

.

The Ryujin Tiamat family held hundreds of trillions in assets. Hundreds.

Of trillions

that never appeared anywhere.

A figure that the human brain processed not as a number but as a

category

.

A geological feature and a weather system.

It existed on a scale where individual billions became rounding errors, where a hundred and fifty billion on a card was—as Melissa demonstrated when she handed it to him—that he was surprised not for the

amount

but for the fact that

she’d trusted him

with the physical object.

The number itself? When your family’s net worth required its own branch of mathematics to express,

individual billions

stopped registering as impressive and started registering as

yes, that seems about right.

So no

. He wasn’t particularly moved by the inheritance.

He was, however, moved by the question that had just arrived in his brain without knocking, pulled in through some combination of Rune

dismantling

the Maxtons and Harold bleeding onto legal paperwork and the general atmosphere of a decade’s worth of misery being retroactively assigned a paper trail.

Why had I never just

asked grandmother for money?

He sat with this.

Why,

genuinely, had he not done that? He had a grandmother. He had aunts. He had an entire family on the Ryujin Tiamat side who could have put him in a palace, fed him something that wasn’t whatever the Maxtons had decided constituted a meal on his bad days, and not noticed the expense—would not have noticed, statistically, mathematically, in any measurable way.

He had people.

He’d always had people.

And he’d spent ten years living in a house where someone who feared the name attached to his blood had still found it worth the risk to put hands on him.

Another question was;

Why did Chaos

leave

me here with Melissa and Maxtons after the burial of mom and dad?

Why had she gone back to Japan

—

or wherever she’d gone—and left the only

Ryujin Tiamat heir

to be raised by the family that had, if today’s paperwork was any indication, been illegally sitting on Ryujin Tiamat money the entire time?

He’d never asked. Not himself, not anyone. The questions had existed somewhere below the waterline of things he thought about, kept down by ten years of more immediate problems—surviving, mostly, and then later just getting through the day, and then later still adjusting to the reality of no longer having to do either of those things in the same way.

He looked at the table. At the blood on Rune’s papers. At the Maxtons and his questions.

Across the table, something happened that he hadn’t predicted and wasn’t in his personal model of how this meeting would go.

The grandfather stood up.

And

bowed

to Rune.

A formal, deliberate, full bow with the calculations of a man who had spent a lifetime navigating exactly where power lived and had looked up right now and found it sitting across from him in a bob cut, holding papers his son had bled on.

Deep enough to mean it. Offered for Harold’s conduct.

Phei stared.

Melissa leaned toward him.

"The Maxtons can be as unpleasant as they like in private,"

she murmured, just below the ambient weight of the room. "But they cannot openly

insult

or

disrespect

the Natsuki family. Not here, not anywhere. Much less the Tiamat family. They’d be dismantled. Publicly, legally, and probably in that order."

Phei absorbed this.

Then he wanted very badly to ask the question that was now sitting directly in the front of his brain, too large to ignore:

Then what the hell was Harold doing for the last years if not making enemies out of both families?

If the Maxtons lived in documented terror of his family name—

if a single Natsuki lawyer in their dining room was enough to make the patriarch bow and Harold rupture something internal and every person on that side of the table go very, very quiet

— then why had Harold

killed the twin

?

Why had he put hands on Delilah? Why had Phei spent a decade in a house that ran partly on Ryujin Tiamat money being treated like something the family had scraped off its shoe?

Why would any man who feared a name abuse the person carrying it?

He didn’t ask Melissa. Melissa wouldn’t have the answer. The answer wasn’t in this room. It was somewhere in the gap between what people did when they thought they were

unobserved

and what they did when the observation arrived, and it pointed somewhere darker and more complicated than a divorce proceeding could reach.

For

known

and unknown reasons now

the Maxtons bent.

And Phei sat at the table, chin in his hands, watching it happen, and wondered—not for the first time, and definitely not for the last—what the fuck was going on.