Chapter 918: Bane of Circle of Cowards
"The thing is," Maddie announced like delivering a State of the Union, "he wanted to. You could see it. That’s the part I’ll be taking to my grave and giggling about from inside the coffin."
The limousine glided on through the gold afternoon, and the back of it had long since stopped pretending to be a vehicle and become, instead, a courtroom — one in which Marcus Heavenchild was being tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia for roughly the eleventh time that hour.
The defense had not shown up or expected.
"He squared up," Maddie went on, miming it with her whole upper body, shoulders rolling back, chin lifting into a truly hideous impression of patrician outrage. "He turned. He took the breath: the little aristocratic inhale a man does right before he says something he’s convinced will be devastating—"
"—and then nothing came out," Delilah finished, grinning into her drink.
"Nothing came out." Maddie pressed a hand to her chest like the memory had wounded her. "He opened his foul mouth, his brain handed it the words, and somewhere between brain and mouth the words remembered what happened at breakfast and decided, very sensibly, to stay home with the door locked."
"The words have seen the footage too," Patricia said mildly, from the head of the cabin. "Everyone’s seen the footage. The words have standards."
Madam Ashford set down her glass unhurriedly like she had questions and intended to have them answered.
"That is the part I still cannot understand," she said. "Marcus. That proud boy. The Prince of Earth, who crossed an entire dining hall uninvited purely to hear his own voice echo off marble." Her dark brow arched. "Maddie screamed — that — across a packed club. At full volume and he did nothing?"
"Nothing he could do, Madam," Amber murmured.
She was folded into Phei’s chest, half-dozing, one eye cracked open and gleaming with the lazy delight of a woman too comfortable to sit up and far too entertained to actually sleep.
Her body was a warm, pliant weight against him, the soft press of her breast rising and falling with each breath, and Phei found himself idly wondering how many of the men they were currently dissecting would sell their own bloodlines for the privilege of having her draped over them like this.
"You should have seen the club; every head turned, every single one. And the moment they clocked who had entered and the Maddie called his nickname—" she gave a small helpless laugh against Phei’s shirt "—you could watch the recognition travel like a wave at a stadium. Because by then the videos had gone everywhere. Everyone in that club knew exactly what Prince of Puddles meant. There wasn’t a soul on this island who hasn’t seen the puddle. The puddle has a verified fan account now."
"So he was trapped," Sierra said, nodding slowly, working the cold logic of it. "React — say anything, do anything — and he reminds people, in real time, precisely why the nickname exists."
"He’d have made it worse," Amber agreed happily. "Maddie had made Marcus finally find the single situation in the universe where his only winning move was to stand very still and pretend, he’d been born deaf."
"Speaking of people who couldn’t stand still," Victoria said sweetly, "Amber, darling, would you like to tell the car what you did when Maddie shouted it? Or shall I?"
Amber’s one open eye narrowed. "Don’t."
"She shrieked," Victoria informed the cabin, with relish. "Grabbed my arm — there’s a mark — and slid halfway off the booth seat. We nearly had a second puddle situation from laughing."
"That is slander—"
"There were witnesses, Amber."
"The said witnesses were also screaming!"
"And whose fault is that," Maddie said, buffing her nails on her dress, "for executing the single greatest piece of live comedy this island has ever hosted. You’re all welcome, by the way. No applause necessary. Financial contributions accepted."
"Greatest piece of comedy," Elena repeated. "You screamed a toilet joke at a war criminal, Maddie. Oscar Wilde is spinning."
"Oscar Wilde would have paid for that seat."
Patricia smiled — "Of course," she said gently, "that much alone wouldn’t have stopped the proud heir."
A ripple of agreement moved around the cabin.
"No," Valentina said, frowning. "It wouldn’t have. He doesn’t think things through — thinking through requires equipment he wasn’t issued." The frown deepened into genuine puzzlement. "Which is why it’s such a surprise Kyle stepped in. Did everyone see that? Marcus had the breath loaded ready to attack — and Kyle leaned over and whispered something in his ear, and Marcus just... let the breath out. Deflated. Whatever Kyle said, it worked."
"Killjoy," Maddie spat, like a curse handed down through generations. "That’s what Kyle is. A professional, practicing killjoy. I was invested, I’d cleared my whole evening for whatever Marcus was about to do, and Kyle reached over and unplugged the entire programme two minutes before the explosion. He robbed me, all of us. I want compensation."
Valentina turned to look at her.
"You realize," she said slowly, "that Marcus is essentially a mad dog at this point? Humiliated, twice, in front of the entire world. A man like that, if nobody stops him, could genuinely do something to you. What if he’d—"
"I was counting on it."
Maddie said it lightly. Cheerfully, even. But her grin had teeth.
"I was waiting for him to dare. Hoping, honestly." Her eyes drifted, unhurried, down the cabin and found Phei’s — and Phei, with Amber dozing on his chest and Elena tucked against his side, wore the smirk of a man who knew exactly what would have remained of anyone who touched what was his.
The thought pleased him in a dark, quiet way. These women were his. Not in some romantic, bloodless sense — but in the older, bloodier way that mattered. Anyone who reached for them would learn, too late, that dragons did not share.
Maddie read that smirk fluently. Had Marcus so much as twitched at her, there would not have been enough of him left to fill a puddle.
But — and this was the part people kept missing about Maddie Whitmore — she hadn’t poked the Prince of Earth as bait, trusting the Phei to swoop in.
No. Maddie had been at war with every Legacy boy alive since long before there was Phei to stand behind since she was just two years old and her nerve had never once been borrowed.
Hers wasn’t the confidence of a woman expecting rescue from her man.
It was the confidence of a woman with something in store to finish her own battles.
