Chapter 788: Chilling Cold Gaze
Success.
That single, triumphant word echoed through Cassiopeia’s mind like a stolen melody as the long, dark car glided away from the Maxton ancestral mansion, threading its way through the patient, whispering hedgerows toward the distant gates.
Success... she had truly done it.
She had not only deceived the stupid, self-important men of her own house — her father, her uncles, the small ancient parliament of patriarchs who had spent the afternoon leaning across the long oak table receiving her report with the grave, patient attention they reserved for intelligence they believed they had paid for — but she had also fooled the overestimated, oh-so-mighty Awakened Jörmungandr Prince himself. Danton... the very Progenitor of her Bloodline, albeit, unawakened.
The newly-anointed apex predator of the Maxton lineage, Danton, recently awakened, recently insufferable and as if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the cake was the fact that he recently was incapable of looking at his own aunt without that small, sovereign condescension of a man who believed his awakening had also awakened, by some unfortunate magical extension, his divine right to dismiss her.
He had not seen through a single word.
Not one syllable.
’Not that wise, are we now, huh, Danton?’
If she’d been telling that bullshit to her Master, Cassiopeia was very sure he would seen through it the moment she started the second sentence.
’And he’s supposed to be the pillar of the family against, Master, and the Ryujin Tiamats? A pity!’
She scoffed.
Danton had not only sat at the head of that long table, sipping his coffee with aristocratic entitlement, and asked her a series of follow-up questions she had rehearsed for hours in a small, embrace of her Master, on the other side of an ocean — a man who had dictated every preferred phrasing with calm, devastating precision.
But Danton had also had swallowed those carefully crafted answers with the slow, approving nod of like he was being told exactly what he wanted to hear from a mole he had planted in his enemy’s circle and he had long since decided she was incapable of telling him anything else.
’Gullible bastard.’
Cassiopeia had nodded with perfect demure grace.
Cassiopeia had been the very picture of obedient daughterhood and kept playing, for one long, sovereign hour, the small, pretty, dutiful instrument the Maxton parliament had been grooming since she was s even — and the parliament, like the small, pretty, dutiful parliament it had always been, had swallowed every honeyed lie without suspicion.
’I wanted, very badly, to laugh.’
But she did not laugh, from sheer self-control she had not laughed.
But now she could.
The car purred through the grand gates.
Beneath the small, obedient, devoted slave that Phei’s women saw each day — the Cassiopeia who bowed so eagerly, who folded herself so willingly into whatever shape the room required, the Cassiopeia who had earned a kind of Phei’s slave legend among Maddie, Sienna, and his women for the slightly concerning enthusiasm with which she greeted her own exquisite subjugation — beneath that carefully crafted slave lived a different woman entirely.
A woman the Maxtons had built and had spent meticulous years forging in secret fire.
The real Cassiopeia was... precise, that Cassiopeia was... dangerous, merciless even but above all; very deceitful.
The very qualities they had instilled in her since childhood — the cool surgical patience, the knife-edge social discretion, the long-practiced skill at saying exactly the wrong thing in exactly the right tone — had been forged for one purpose: to serve the family.
To extend its reach. To make her, in time, their perfect instrument.
What none of them had ever paused to imagine — what none of them, in their long sovereign certainty about what Maxton women were for, had ever considered — was that the same blade could be turned around; that the same instrument could find a new, far more worthy hand...
... And slice their throats too.
That the precise, dangerous, merciless, deceitful daughter they had trained could be unsheathed against the family itself by the simple, devastating expedient of someone else asking her, very politely, with one warm hand resting on the small private place between her ribs that the family had never thought to defend.
That someone had asked.
She had unsheathed her blade and brought it mercilessly with a smile and settled it on their Adam’s apple.
And the family — sitting now in their patient ancient mansion, three generations of patriarchs digesting a report she had personally written under the quiet dictation of a Cosmic Dragon — were operating on intelligence they trusted because their Cassiopeia had delivered it.
’Their good, obedient, loyal Cassiopeia.’
She did not hold back the laugh now.
Quietly. Once. Behind her hand, a soft, wicked sound that tasted like victory and sin.
The hotel driver, in the front seat, did not turn.
Of course, the laugh had not from just that success.
There had been something else she had accomplished!
The agreement with her mother.
Cassiopeia had walked out of the ancestral mansion with her phone held very still against her thigh and a small, private contract sitting somewhere behind her teeth — the cool, patient understanding she had reached with Madeleine over the last hour of their tea, the quiet meeting of two Maxton women who had discovered, over careful sips and sharper truths, that they had considerably more in common with each other than either had ever been led to believe.
’That is Phase One.’
The first phase of the most important mission Cassiopeia had ever, in her short, obedient life, been entrusted with by her Master.
She’d return to her post beside Phei Ryujin Tiamat with the small, confident assurance to her family that this time, she would come back with his soul.
And the family — moving now, as they always did when the Destined Day approached, in that kind of blind, ravenous faith that put logic in the back seat and let raw appetite drive — had let her go.
Because they believed; even if she failed to bind Phei, she would buy them time.
Enough time to devise another option, another instrument; a last, death-dealer stroke that would claim Phei’s life before the Destined Day arrived and turned him into the kind of problem they could no longer solve.
They could not afford an eyesore like Phei. The bloodlines they needed — the ones whose progenitors had to be brought back — were the very bloodlines Phei had begun, with the slow, sovereign patience of a man who knew exactly what he was protecting, to shelter as his own i.e. Sierra.
And it would be more if they waited for so long.
’Master’s a threat to their success.’
He was a problem.
She knew some of their plans.
She did not know all of them.
She had, in fact, the same access her mother had — which was to say, the access of the only two week women in a family of men and old generation old grandmas.
The two women held some significant authority but nothing close to the real power.
She received orders. Sometimes she received the reasons and often she received only the orders, with the small civil expectation that a Maxton daughter did not require reasons, only directions.
What the men had not yet understood — and would not understand until the door of their own house opened on them from the inside — was that she had spent the last several moments of her life delivering those reason-less orders to another man.
And that man had the patience, and the appetite, to read between the orders and find the entire treacherous architecture beneath them.
He’d been finding it.
Steadily...
Patiently...
The car came around the long, sweeping curve of the Infinity Chaos approach.
Her whole body buzzed once in excitement — the warmth of returning to clear range now that she called home. Phei was up there, probably operating somewhere on the high, dangerous end of the board.
She did not, immediately, go to him.
She got out of the car at the lobby and took the private elevator before she stepped out onto the long, hushed hall of the top floor.
Phei’s penthouse doors waited at the end of the hall.
Huge... pale... closed.
She paused and looked at them.
The bond with her Master was warm against her soul like a living ember. He was there.
He must be fed now and entertained and probably half-naked and definitely amused, and the moment she walked through those doors she could fold herself back into the patient, devoted slave she had been waiting to wear for him this whole time; the long, sovereign quiet of moments he spent being industriously fucking her through her mother’s tea would soften, gradually, into the warm, safe place she actually lived now.
She wanted that.
She wanted it so badly it ached.
Cassiopeia turned, instead, walked off to another door and knocked.
There was a pause before the door opened.
A woman stood in it.
The two of them looked at each other for a long, quiet moment — the kind of weighted look two women exchanged when each had spent considerable time in the other’s vicinity and had not yet found a universe in which to be honest with one another.
Cassiopeia did not, immediately, smile. Melissa did not, immediately, frown.
Then Melissa eventually stepped aside and let Cassiopeia walk in.
Was the penthouse next door larger than Cassiopeia remembered? Or perhaps was it simply that the Maxton ancestral mansion had recalibrated her sense of scale, leaving everything else feeling strangely intimate?
No, it had to be the chilling cold gaze of Melissa!
