Chapter 797: The Carrier
He crossed the bedroom to the living room’s library and picked up the small, worn-looking book resting on the side table, the same book that had followed him for more than a decade, sitting wherever he was and looking, at every glance, like something of no consequence — a shabby cousin at a gathering of aristocrats.
Only someone who truly understood books would have recognized what it actually was, and Phei himself had not, not until very recently, despite having carried it in his hands for over ten years.
Sometimes divinity sat on your shelf for years while you treated it like decoration, and the universe rarely bothered to correct you; it had a sense of humour that leaned toward cruelty and a patience for irony that bordered on the divine.
He placed it back on the high shelf, sliding it between two far more impressive leather-bound volumes until it disappeared into the spine-line where it belonged, then he went back and cast one last look at Eira, smiled — soft, almost fond — and closed the bedroom door behind him.
He had not, until tonight, actually toured the rest of his Infinity Chaos penthouse.
Phei had been many things in the last two weeks — sovereign, busy, harem-managing, occasionally unconscious — but a man who explored his own residence had not been one of them.
The place was absurdly vast even by the standards of those who measured wealth in square footage, and calling it a penthouse felt almost insulting when the reality was closer to a palace floating among the clouds, an endless sprawl of marble, glass, dark wood, and recessed lighting that seemed to stretch on forever, every room furnished with the kind of obsessive extravagance usually reserved for grandmothers who expressed love exclusively through interior design and unchecked spending.
Until now, the only parts of the building he had truly known about the place, were the living room and the bedroom he slept in.
He smiled faintly to himself and stepped out, pulling the heavy double doors shut behind him with a deep, satisfying click that echoed down the corridor.
The hallway was a study in quiet excess, soft golden light spilling across floors of polished marble while floor-to-ceiling glass panels revealed the city glittering far below like a living constellation.
The air conditioning pressed cool against the glass with the faint press of the nature slight chill, a reminder that even here, high above everything, the forest’s breath still found its way in, and the entire corridor looked more expensive than most people’s lifelong ambitions.
Across the long, quiet hallway stood Melissa’s suite.
Melissa shared the space with Patricia — Melissa Ryujin Tiamat, the youngest daughter of the Ryujin Tiamat matriarch. Patricia remained attached to Melissa’s hip as friends with the quiet, patient closeness of two women who shared the same man.
Phei smiled at the thought.
He crossed the corridor calmly and knocked on Melissa’s door, the sound low and unhurried against the heavy wood.
Her penthouse sat not far his and while he waited, two things were happening behind him.
The first was the arrival, at the far end of the hallway, of two young women moving in the bright, bouncing manner of girls who had been told that they could spent time with the young master of Infinity Chaos Hotel and his women and were on the same floor with him.
Paige and Brielle, the Heavenchild twins, lingered there briefly, talking amongst themselves and laughing quietly about something completely unrelated, too distracted by each other’s company and whatever private joke they were sharing to notice the women farther behind them.
The first carried the cool composure of a heiress whose family had spent the morning rehearsing her, while the second moved with the unrehearsed enthusiasm of a girl who had decided to come along for moral support and possibly a husband, in that order.
The twins stopped at the threshold of the long hallway, exchanged a look between best friends, and — finding the young master’s huge pale doors still closed and the corridor lighting unhurried — simply lingered.
The second thing, Phei did not see as Melissa opened the door and let him in; behind the lingering girls, at a discreet distance two meters back, a woman in a hotel uniform pushed a service trolley to a slow stop.
She was not, technically, a hotel staff member.
She was wearing a hotel staff uniform, and it fit her well to not believe she was part of the staff.
The trolley itself was, by every visible measure, an entirely appropriate trolley — Infinity Chaos crested, polished brass handles, the soft heavy weight of a kitchen cart that had been in service of the rooms; she looked like she had just served one of the guests in one of the many penthouses.
She had spent considerable time and not insignificant capital ensuring it would be.
Unlike the others who wandered this floor — the staff who bowed and moved and performed their duties with the trained invisible efficiency of people who understood that the residents up here did not wish to be reminded that service existed — this woman’s attention sharpened the instant she saw certain doors.
Her eyes locked onto them with the specific focus of someone who was not here to serve.
She parked the trolley behind the lingering girls until they left and she finally leaned her elbows on the polished brass push-handle, and allowed a small smirk to curve onto her lips — a smile of a thief who had, across the long unhurried span of her career, been prepared for many evenings, but had not, until tonight, been prepared for an evening of this particular caliber.
"Well," she murmured softly to herself, in the bright sovereign tone like tonight was about to bring the most lucrative shift of her career. "Let’s see what the godly young master of Infinity Chaos Hotel has to offer."
She had heard the rumors.
Tonight, unlike the patient cool nights of her quiet career — the long years of stealing from rich folks and Legacies whose households, while well-furnished, had been normal households, with normal silver and normal porcelain and modest four-figure thefts that paid her rent and the occasional dental work — tonight, by every account she had been able to verify with her sources in, promised to be considerably more fruitful.
According to those sources — and she had paid for them generously, in unmarked bills, the way one always paid for honest sources — the kitchenware alone in the young master’s penthouse bordered on insanity.
A single fork used in his kitchen was worth over ten thousand dollars.
Ten thousand.
For a fork; just one.
Even now the thought felt absurd, that kind of number that made her hands itch and her skepticism evaporate simultaneously, because a man whose forks cost ten thousand dollars did not, by any honest accounting, drink from ordinary glasses or eat from ordinary plates or keep ordinary things in his cabinets, do not mention his bedroom.
Take twenty pieces of cutlery and she would be set for weeks — maybe months, if she sold them carefully enough through the right channels to the right buyers who understood that discretion was worth a surcharge.
That was two hundred thousand dollars, in twenty graceful little pieces of cutlery alone, and she would be set for several months before she even needed to think about a follow-up score.
And that was just the cutlery.
’And if something as insignificant as a fork holds that much value... then what exactly awaits deeper inside that penthouse? Jewellery? Watches? Wine collections? Maybe even some artefacts?’
She swallowed slowly, the excitement creeping into her chest like a drug she had long since stopped pretending she didn’t enjoy.
For once — for the first time in a career that had been profitable but never transformative — she genuinely felt like she was about to rob gods instead of rich people.
’Luckily, I bought a big carrier.’
The trolley beside her appeared ordinary from the outside — standard issue, brass-handled, the kind that carried fresh linens and bottled water and the small pleasant amenities wealthy guests expected to appear in their rooms without the inconvenience of asking.
But hidden beneath its lower compartment rested an oversized carrier bag, specifically modified for precisely this kind of evening — reinforced seams, silent zippers, internal padding to prevent clinking, large enough to accommodate a substantial haul and discreet enough to pass any casual inspection.
A very big carrier.
Because tonight? Tonight she intended to leave unimaginably rich.
