Chapter 776: Salvation: Jokes & Irony on You, Cassiopeia

The Maxton ancestral lattice was a collection of very expensive, very antique furniture that had been comfortable for far too long and was about to be very, very uncomfortable—and the worst part, the genuinely hilarious part if one had the bandwidth to find it funny, was that they were going to march straight into the discomfort holding briefcases full of the wrong intelligence, wearing the serene expressions of men who believed their bloodline made them bulletproof.

Was there even a moment, after her first two terrified, heat-drenched days as Phei’s slave, that she had regretted walking into that penthouse to bind him?

She could answer that in half a heartbeat, frankly, with change left over.

By her third day as Phei’s slave, Cassiopeia had already decided becoming Phei’s slave was the single best decision of her life.

And she did not have many of those—

her own decisions

.

She never had, when she stopped to look at her whole life honestly, which she tried not to do too often because the memory of her history was depressing as hell.

Even the act of going to bind him in the first place had not been hers.

The Maxton patriarchs and Danton had ordered it.

She had been the

bait

, the binding-piece, the family’s chosen vessel for their project of subduing a Cosmic Dragon and she had not been consulted much less receive an invitation to the meeting that decided her fate as a good bait for getting Phei’s soul.

’The

irony

is that even what I now consider the best decision of my life to willingly become Phei’s had not technically been mine to make from the start.’

The Maxtons had pushed her into it... her family had literally

wrapped

her up in pretty paper, (had even chose the black dress she wore that night) tied a bow around her neck, and handed her, sealed and ribboned, straight to her own salvation.

They had been trying to chain a dragon and had instead

chained

her—and the chaining had turned out to be the most beautiful, most ruinously perfect gift any Maxton in the entire ancestral lattice had ever given her.

Accidentally, against their will. With the determined, almost artistic incompetence of people who had aimed for one outcome and produced its screaming,

wet

, ecstatic opposite with the precision of a professional saboteur.

She knew she would feel accomplished about it for the rest of her life. Which was, by Maxton calendar of reckoning, going to be a rather long and increasingly

well-fucked

life.

’Jokes and irony on you, Cassiopeia’

What she had thought, in those first hot, terrified hours of the binding, was a curse—an eternal sentence delivered with the polite consolation that at least the sex would be good for eternity, an upside she had at the time considered the dignified equivalent of being told the gallows came with a memory-foam mattress—had turned out to be her

salvation

in the most literal, most shamelessly carnal sense.

’Am I even a slave?’

Technically,

yes

. The Mark on her pulsed faintly like Phei’s conscious at the back of her awareness at all times, like a small, considerate roommate who made sure she never forgot which apartment she belonged to—and whose

cock

she belonged to.

She could not lie to him or move against him and his family without the consequences landing on her soul, ranging from mild discomfort to soul-deep, toe-curling pain that somehow always managed to feel like foreplay.

That was a slave bond. That was the definition of what she was.

You could say she has the receipts.

But—and the thought made her smile faintly into her cup, thighs pressing together around the cool, heavy promise still buried inside her—

Was she really a slave?

Or had she simply traded one set of ancient, dusty chains for a pair that fit better, felt hotter, and made her come so hard she saw entire constellations behind her eyes?

’That sounds like a fair deal to me.’

So, was Cassiopeia a slave of Phei?

In anything but the name?

Certainly,

if she ever did something colossally foolish against Phei, the mark would awaken like a lover’s jealous bite—sharp, intimate, perfectly measured to sting just enough to remind her exactly whose name lived inside her skin.

She would suffer, yes, but the world had always been unforgiving in that same exquisite, velvet-lined way it had always been.

And the consequences for a foolish misstep, betrayal, disobedience against the Legacies—without Phei’s claim wrapped around her like warm, living silk—would have been

infinitely

more final

.

Blunder with the Legacies? You simply ceased to exist.

They offered no punishment, no delicious corrective ache that left you slick and gasping. No stern yet wickedly inventive lecture that somehow ended with your thighs trembling and his name broken on your tongue.

They

erased

you with the casual indifference like they’re signing for a parcel of imported champagne, then resumed their afternoon without so much as a wrinkle in their silk cuffs.

Make the same mistake with Phei? A bright, breathtaking flash of pain—brief, precise, the kind that bloomed into something filthy and instructive, the kind that left her cunt fluttering and her mind humming with the low, shameful certainty that correction was merely foreplay in another, sweeter key.

Phei did not kill his slaves for stupidity.

Phei corrected them, occasionally with a creativity so dark and inventive it made her wonder whether the man had studied torment or simply invented a new dialect of

pleasure-pain

while she wasn’t looking.

The Legacies erased them, occasionally with paperwork and a light lunch.

’It is not a question of

good and evil

,’

she mused, the thought unfurling through her like the slow, cool throb of the void-ice still seated so obscenely deep between her thighs.

’It is a question of the

lesser evil

—

’ which she was reasonably certain was a phrase that did not technically exist, but which felt accurate enough that she was prepared to coin it on the spot, gild it in gold, and hang it above her bed as a personal creed while Phei fucked the philosophy right out of her.

She smiled wider, slow and secret, the motion tugging the living ice just enough to draw a tiny, traitorous sigh from her lips that tasted of surrender and dark espresso.

And the alternative tyranny, she ought to note for the sake of scrupulous fairness—the alternative tyranny occasionally settled her into a leather chair exactly like this one, stretched her open with a gift of thoughtful, freezing beauty, and called her perfect in that low, ruined voice while her walls clenched around his design like a devoted whore in church.

The competing tyranny, on its finest day, merely signed a death warrant and called it mercy.

She wasn’t going to win any ethics seminar with that argument.

Fortunately, she was not entering one.

"What’re you thinking?"

A female voice arrived from behind, drifting through the ancient air like perfume across the edge of a blade.

Cassiopeia’s body tensed—instinctive, instantaneous—but that the tension had nothing whatsoever to do with fear of the women.

Cassiopeia did not, and had never, feared her.

Her mother was a patriarch’s wife, beautiful and patient and like Cassiopeia in her own exquisitely preserved way.

There was nothing about her mother to fear.

The tension was the tension of a

mission

that possessed a voice and a body.

A mission that had, until this very heartbeat, been seated upstairs and had now, evidently, descended to the living room to discover her daughter alone with her coffee—wearing whatever exquisite daywear the old house had deemed appropriate for welcoming an only daughter home from a long absence, and trailing that same perfume Cassiopeia had inhaled from pillows since she was small enough to crawl into them and pretend the fabric was warm, living skin.

The delicious possibilities of the mission’s success

unfurled

across Cassiopeia’s awareness in slow, molten warmth—patient and obscene, like the void-ice settling deeper, stretching her wider, reminding her exactly whose clever little slave she remained even while she played the flawless daughter.

She set the porcelain cup down with deliberate care on the side-table, the faint clink sounding absurdly loud in the vast, watchful quiet.

She turned in the leather chair.

A small, wicked smile touched the corner of her mouth before she could quite conceal it—a smile her mother, stepping into the room behind her, had not yet earned the privilege of seeing.

By the time Cassiopeia rose, the smile had smoothed itself into the flawless, civil composure she had mastered before she ever learned to ride a bicycle, and which she now rode with equal, shameless expertise.

"Mother."

Time was now.

***

A/N:

Guys what do you think is the mission?