Chapter 570: The Montgomery Dinner: Vs Jonathan

The first course had arrived with the silent efficiency of servants trained to be invisible.

French onion soup. The scent of caramelized sweetness and aged gruyère curled through the air like a promise nobody at this table intended to keep. Crystal bowls caught the chandelier light, transforming broth into liquid amber. Silver spoons gleamed with the particular cruelty of wealth that wanted you to know exactly how much it had spent on cutlery.

Nobody was eating.

Jonathan held his spoon like a judge’s gavel—suspended, waiting, the implement of a man about to deliver sentencing. Roxanne stared at her bowl as though it contained prophecy instead of soup, her voluptuous chest rising and falling with breaths she was trying very hard to control.

The midnight-blue fabric of her dress did nothing to conceal the swell of her breasts, the shadowed valley between them catching candlelight with each trembling inhale.

And her nipples remained painfully and attractively visible through the expensive silk—twin points of shameful arousal she couldn’t

will

away no matter how desperately she pressed her thighs together beneath the tablecloth.

Sierra sat rigid beside Phei, fingers interlaced with his under the table, squeezing hard enough to leave crescents in his palm.

Melissa on the other hand ate.

Calm. Composed. Spine straight, movements precise, the picture of aristocratic grace that Paradise’s elite had tried and failed to replicate for generations. She brought the spoon to her lips, swallowed, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

Phei watched her and felt something warm unfurl in his chest.

My woman. My aunt. My everything.

Jonathan set his spoon down with a deliberate clink.

Here we go.

"So."

The word fell like an executioner’s blade. "You’re the boy who’s been... involved with my daughter."

"I am."

"And with your aunt." Jonathan’s gaze slithered toward Melissa—cold, assessing, the look of a man examining evidence he intended to use for destruction.

"The woman sitting at my table who spread her legs for her own nephew. Who was so desperate for attention that she crawled into bed with a child she was supposed to be raising.

Tell me, Melissa, does it still feel

worth

it now that the whole room knows what a pathetic,

incestuous whore

you’ve become?"

Melissa’s spoon paused mid-motion... Just a heartbeat. Then she continued eating as though Jonathan had remarked on the weather.

But Phei saw her jaw tighten. Saw the flash of something wounded beneath the composure—a crack in the armor she wore like a second skin.

The Void-Ice stirred beneath his flesh. Cold. Hungry. Patient.

Jonathan wasn’t finished.

"And your cousins—the Maxton girls. Three sisters, wasn’t it? All of them?" His lip curled with theatrical disgust. "What kind of family produces women so broken, so starved, that they’d share a teenage boy between them like passing around a toy? The rumors about that household make sense now.

Clearly dysfunction breeds dysfunction

. Three sisters. One boy. How delightfully economical. Do they take turns, or do they just pile on top of each other like animals in heat?"

Roxanne

flinched.

Actually flinched—a small, involuntary motion that sent ripples through the generous swell of her breasts, her body betraying her even as her face struggled to maintain its mask of superiority.

Her husband didn’t notice.

He was too busy savoring the taste of his own venom.

"And then there’s the others. Women—twice your age, spreading their thighs for a boy young enough to be their son. Oh yes, I’ve heard those whispers too. Various Legacy daughters who apparently have no self-respect and even less sense."

Jonathan leaned back, steepling his fingers in the universal pose of men who believed their opinions were verdicts.

"You’ve built quite the collection. A harem of broken toys and desperate housewives, all circling a boy who hasn’t even graduated high school.

Quite the little stud

farm you’ve assembled, boy. Tell me—do you keep score, or do you just fuck them until they start crying your name like it’s a religion?"

Sierra’s hand trembled in Phei’s grip. He could feel her rage building—volcanic, desperate, the urge to defend him clawing at her throat like a caged animal.

He squeezed once.

She swallowed it down. Stayed silent. Let this play out the way it had to play out.

Good girl.

"Tell me," Jonathan continued, voice dripping with the particular contempt of a man who had spent decades destroying careers and had confused cruelty with competence, "what exactly

do you offer these women?

Besides youth and whatever... technique you’ve learned from watching

pornography?

What could a seventeen-year-old charity case possibly give them that they couldn’t find from an actual man?

Or is it just the novelty of fucking

something that still gets hard

without pills?

"

The room went cold.

Not figuratively. The actual temperature plummeted—Void-Ice stirring beneath Phei’s skin, responding to the fury he kept locked behind his teeth like a dragon coiled in its cave. Frost crackled faintly along his knuckles under the table where no one could see.

The fine hairs on Roxanne’s exposed shoulders stood at attention, her nipples tightening further against the gossamer prison of her dress, though she couldn’t have said whether it was the supernatural chill or something far more dangerous making her body respond.

Eira’s voice whispered in his head:

"Easy. Don’t freeze the man’s soup. That would be rude."

He almost smiled. Almost.

Instead, he picked up his own spoon. Took a deliberate sip of the soup. Let the silence stretch until it became a blade of its own—sharp, patient, waiting to cut.

"You

done?"

he asked.

Jonathan’s eyes narrowed.

"Excuse me?"

"Your speech was good. I can tell you’ve been

rehearsing

since you heard I was coming." Phei set the spoon down with the casual precision of a man laying down a card he knew would win the hand.

"The broken toys. The desperate housewives. The pornography comment—nice touch, by the way. Very dignified. Are you finished, or is there more? Because if you’re going to keep swinging that

limp dick

of an

insult

around, at least try to hit something that isn’t already bleeding."

"I’m asking you a question."

"No.

You’re not asking anything

. You’re

performing."

Phei met the older man’s gaze without flinching—amethyst eyes finding ice-chip blue and refusing to look away.

"You’re showing your wife and daughter what a

strong patriarch

looks like when he defends his family honor. The problem is you’ve just insulted every woman I care about, including the one sitting three feet from your wife and your daughter too. And you expect me to what? Apologize?

Grovel?

Explain myself to a man who thinks calling my aunt desperate makes him look powerful instead of cruel?

How quaint.

How very small of you.

"

Jonathan’s jaw locked with an audible click.

"You want to know what I offer them, Mr. Montgomery?" Phei leaned forward slightly. "I offer them attention. I offer them presence. I offer them the radical fucking concept that their feelings and presence matter—that their pleasure matters, that their happiness matters, that they’re not just accessories to a man’s ambition or footnotes in someone else’s story. I offer them the one thing you never could: the feeling of being wanted for who they are, not what they can do for your precious legacy."

He let that land. Watched Jonathan’s expression flicker like a candle in a sudden wind.

"I know that doesn’t

compute in your world

. In your world, what your wife feels doesn’t matter. Whether she’s satisfied doesn’t matter. Whether she’s lonely, whether she’s starving for something you stopped giving her years ago—none of that matters because you’ve got cases to win and a legal empire to run and a Supreme Court to control. You’ve built a kingdom on neglect and called it strength. How

impressive."

Roxanne had gone very still.

Her thighs pressed together beneath the tablecloth with desperate, involuntary pressure.

The slick heat between them had nothing to do with the conversation and everything to do with the boy sitting across from her—the boy who had touched her hand and awakened hungers she’d spent two decades burying.

The boy who was now

dismantling

her husband’s composure with the surgical precision of a master while she sat there trying not to squirm in her own arousal.

"But here’s what I’ve learned, Mr. Montgomery. Those things—the

feelings,

the

attention,

the

making someone feel

like they exist—that’s what makes

life worth living.

That’s the source of happiness only then can then enjoy the money and power they hold onto their names, freely and happily. Not the control you think you have over everyone and everything."

Phei’s voice dropped lower. Almost gentle. Almost pitying.

"The irony is, you know this already. You know it so well that you’ve got mistresses to fill the gap your wife can’t fill because you won’t let her close enough to try. How does it feel, knowing the only way you can get

hard

these days is by paying women to pretend you still matter?"

The silence that followed was absolute.

Roxanne’s breath stopped in her throat. Her eyes snapped to his face with the desperate hunger of a woman watching someone pull back the curtain on every lie she’d told herself for twenty years.

She’d known about the mistresses. Legacy wives always knew—you learned to read the signs like tea leaves, like prophecy, like the death sentence they were.

But that was fine because his absence meant she was safe and free for the night before he comes back

.

1

And this boy—this seventeen-year-old boy who shouldn’t know anything about anything—had looked at her once and known everything she’d been hiding.

Under the table, her thighs pressed together again but not from arousal this time. From something worse.

Recognition.

Jonathan’s face had cycled through colors—pale, then red, then something mottled and dangerous that wasn’t healthy for a man his age.

"How dare—"

More to that later.