Chapter 919: The Roast
"Besides," she added, breezy, stealing a grape off Sierra, "the faces of the other princesses when they saw him ground his teeth? When the big comeback they expected died in his throat? Art. I’d commission it in oils. ’Portrait of a Prince Discovering Consequences, circa This Week.’"
"It’s getting old, though," Sierra said.
The cabin turned to her.
"What he says," she clarified, cool and flat. "He tried the whole routine again at the club, you know. Same speech. The Melissa-Phei relationship, the cousins-illicit romance, mother-and-daughter, the family that — well. The entire brunch monologue reheated and served a second time. Are they going to keep using the same words against Phei? About all of us?"
She made a small dismissive gesture. "It doesn’t land anymore. It stopped holding any weight for me some time ago."
"That’s because it’s the only thing they have," Patricia said.
And she was right, and the truth of it settled over the cabin like a warm blanket.
Because that was the joke at the center of everything:
The Legacy boys were drowning in skeletons in their closets packed so full the doors had stopped shutting, generations of buried bodies and bought silences and crimes Phei could drag blinking into the daylight any afternoon he got bored.
And Phei gave them nothing back. No scandal. No rot. No soft place to slide a knife.
So they stood there clutching the one solitary thing they could whittle into an insult — the shape of his relationships — and, worse, far worse, they lacked the imagination to find a second angle.
"At this point it’s like they’ve been programmed or whatever," Elena said, with magnificent disdain. "Pull the string on the back, and the little Legacy prince doll says it’s one phrase."
She mimed pulling a cord at her own neck. "Incest orgy on good china." Pulled it again. "Incest orgy on good china." A third pull, then she shook the imaginary doll violently. "That’s it. That’s the entire vocabulary. Centuries of bloodline, billions in the vault, and not one of them has sprung for a thesaurus. One insult, shared between the whole Circle like a single brain cell being passed around the table on a lazy Susan."
The cabin laughed.
"Legacy princes, bullshit." Elena went on, savoring every syllable, "These ones have one collective sentence and the survival instincts of a moth. And honestly — at this point I just want to know why the Heavenchilds keep letting their yapping, brainless dog off the leash every single time. They unclip him, he sprints directly into traffic, and the entire family gets humiliated again on the hour, every hour, like a cuckoo clock of shame. Who keeps opening the gate?"
"To be fair to the moth," Victoria put in, "the moth at least commits to the lightbulb."
Maddie said, wiping her eyes: "Did everyone get a proper look at Anderson in the club lighting? Because I’d seen the photos. We’ve all seen the photos. But the photos do not do it justice."
"The scar?" Amber breathed, delighted.
"The scar. Temple to jaw is as clean as a signature." Maddie clutched the seat for support. "It is, and I say this with my whole chest, a masterpiece. Someone should hang it in a gallery — except it’s already mounted. On his face. Permanently. The artist signed his work and the canvas has to attend galas."
Phei examined his coffee with the serene modesty of a man being reviewed.
"I was going through a minimalist phase," he said. "One line. Negative space. The critics have been kind."
"The critics," Elena said, "wet themselves. Sorry — wrong prince."
The car howled. Madam Ashford had to set her glass down entirely.
"He kept turning his good side to the room all night," Victoria observed, once breathing resumed. "As if that helps. As if we don’t all know there’s a matched set back there."
"And Zack just — stood there," Delilah said. "All night. Completely stiff. You know that very specific stillness a man adopts when he’s concluded that if he doesn’t move, nobody will remember he exists?"
"Didn’t work," Maddie said. "We remembered; we remembered exactly what’s wrong with him."
"Standing is more or less the only thing still available to him," Phei observed, with the gentle tone of a doctor delivering a prognosis, and the cabin dissolved again, because every soul present knew precisely, he had unmade in Zack Preston and precisely why he would be standing very, very still in dim rooms for the remainder of his natural life.
"Aiden and the glove," Amber giggled. "He kept doing the thing — adjusting it. Tugging the cuff. Like a magician about to do a trick he’s praying nobody asks to see twice."
"And every time," she went on, lifting her head off Phei’s chest just enough to be properly heard, because this was the observation that had been building all afternoon, "every time one of us said Phei’s name—" she tipped her chin at Phei "—they flinched."
"They shivered," Victoria corrected.
"All three of them. Anderson, Zack, Aiden. I counted four separate occasions. Someone says Phei, conversational volume, in passing — and a little ripple goes through the whole row of them. Like dogs that have learned what the rolled-up newspaper means."
"Pavlov’s cowards," Elena murmured, and had to put her drink down before she dropped it.
"I should bottle it," Victoria mused. "Sell it as a service. ’Say Phei’s name at any Legacy gathering — watch three heirs check their trousers. Rates negotiable.’" He sipped his coffee. "Passive income."
And through all of it — through the howling and the wiping of eyes — Phei was enjoying himself, openly, lazily, the way a dragon enjoys lying on gold it personally collected.
The sound of their laughter, the warm press of Amber’s body, the way Elena’s thigh rested against his — it all fed the same low, satisfied hunger. These women were his. The Legacy boys could choke on their one pathetic insult while he sat here, surrounded by everything they would never touch.
But some part of his attention had drifted, quietly, to Emily.
