Chapter 795: Earth’s Royal Court.
And Victoria — Victoria — was, for the third uncomposed time that afternoon, openly howling forward over her knees. The sound tore out of her raw and unfiltered, shaking her entire frame as laughter took hold of her again, the kind of helpless, body-deep laughter that left no room for dignity or restraint.
Maddie looked at Sierra with the small bright sovereign affection of a friend who had been winning fights against her since they could walk.
"Honey, please. I have always dominated talentwise."
"You have, yes. Until then."
"And I will continue to dominate."
"Yeah, Maddie, convince yourself."
"Just so we’re absolutely clear, sweetie — rest assured. You will never get anything I want to take again. Phei just — Phei just — you have to admit — makes everything I want feel and have complete. He is the keystone of my entire programme."
"Yes, he does that to everyone, doesn’t he."
The chorus of that statement was instant.
Sierra. Maddie. Delilah. Elena. Amber.
All, at the same patient heartbeat, with the unhurried glow of women who had each, in their own afternoon, been thoroughly made complete by the same boy, and who were, at this exact heartbeat, still radiating the afterglow of the experience in a way that made every other girl in a five-meter radius feel, very faintly, jealous.
Jade — who had not yet had the experience and felt envious — frowned, professionally.
"You four are insufferable."
"Honey."
"You radiate."
"We do, sweetie."
"It is vulgar, Maddie. It is vulgarity. I am sitting here drinking tea with my hair ruined and being radiated at."
"Sweetie, you are welcome to sit further away."
Around them, the rest of the lounge moved in slow, respectful currents, keeping a careful distance from the table that had become, without anyone saying it aloud, the true centre of gravity in the room.
The lounge itself was — even by Hell’s Paradise standards — excessive in its quiet luxury. Long pale silk couches whose price had once been quoted at the level of a small nation’s quarterly defence budget.
A floor of amber Italian marble, cold and flawless, polished until it threw the chandelier light back upward in sharp, insolent gleams. Low brass tables held tea services so old they carried the weight of museum pieces, yet they were being used casually by the young women sprawled across the silk.
A wall of glass overlooked the Paradise lagoon below, the late afternoon light slanting across the room in long, slow bars of gold that caught on the edges of glass and metal.
And around this table moved other people — adult men and women, heirs who were powerful in every other room they entered. They orbited at a respectful distance, speaking in lowered voices, aware in some deep, uncomfortable part of themselves that the loudest table in the lounge did not belong to them.
Because that table was Earth’s small private royal court.
Forget Elena Ashford...
Jade Park alone — whose family had, across three generations, reached the kind of influence that meant no one on the planet could step onto a plane, board a yacht, or ride in a car without, in some indirect way, paying a Park royalty.
If the Parks did not own the manufacturer outright, they owned a controlling stake.
If they did not own the stake, they owned the engineer who had designed the prototype and collected a quiet dividend every quarter that almost no one in the room had ever been told about.
Sierra Montgomery and Maddie Whitmore, the two mysteries. Everyone in this room knew who they were. Almost no one truly knew them. They did not appear in magazines. They did not attend televised galas.
Their names carried the careful weight of deities — invoked softly, never addressed directly, treated with the particular respect their families had always commanded.
Elena too was private, yes. But not in the same way as those two. Elena’s privacy still allowed certain things to be seen. Sierra and Maddie allowed nothing; everything that belonged to them stayed theirs.
And the most private of all — the one almost no one outside Main Paradise and the academy had ever seen in any documented way — was Sienna.
Did anyone in this lounge outside their small inner circle even know what Sienna looked like?
Probably not.
That, too, was on purpose.
**
"Yes, well," Elena said, with the quiet pride of a girl who had decided the conversation needed steering back to her, "I am, of course, the queen among us."
A short silence followed, Maddie opened her mouth to refute it but she closed her mouth again.
Because Maddie Whitmore had recently witnessed, the particular ease with which Phei moved to towards Elena unlike them who came to him; Elena had made him come to her.
Elena had claimed Phei with less effort than any of them had used.
Considerably less.
It was, to put it charitably — and Maddie was trying to put it charitably — infuriatingly easy for her.
"Sweetie."
"Mm?"
"I hate you."
"I know."
"You are infuriatingly good at this."
"I know."
"And I will, eventually, find a way to take something back."
"I know. It will be adorable to see you try."
The Paradise Princesses Rebellion was, by Maddie’s private internal calendar, about to begin.
Jade and Natasha had arrived this afternoon. Their families had crossed Hell’s Paradise.
Priya Kapoor was on her way.
The Romano princesses had RSVP’d, with the particular enthusiasm of girls who could not, by any rules, decline an invitation from Maddie.
Clara Moreau had said yes.
Juliette Howard had said yes.
Zara, however, was complicated.
Zara still carried the quiet weight of what had happened to her brother, and the silence she had kept all season had, for Maddie, the texture of a girl trying to decide whether she was still a princess or had already become something else.
Abigail Price was, by some measure, one of them.
By every other measure, she was not. The Price princess did not socialize.
Had any of the girls in this room ever, in any recorded moment, actually spoken to the enigmatic Price princess?
’Probably not.’
That, too, was on purpose.
The Paradise Princesses Rebellion was about to begin.
And no one — not Sierra, not Delilah, not Elena, not Yuki, not Jade, not Natasha, not Victoria, not the three couches of girls who had not yet arrived — knew exactly why Maddie was doing it.
On the surface as far as Sierra knew, it was simple. It was for Phei.
’But is that all?’
Just to bring Phei more princesses, to expand his circle by another half-dozen candidates? Or was there something else moving beneath it — some deeper design only the small chaotic girl herself had thought through, and was, for now, keeping behind her pomegranate lipstick, her surgical compact, and her small bright dangerous smile?
’Time is going to tell.’
