Chapter 920: Unhealed Wounds, Phei’s Only Secret
She sat composed. Pleasant with her face giving nothing away —
To anyone else in the cabin she was simply listening, savouring the demolition with the rest of them.
But Phei was not anyone else, and he could see the small thing the others couldn’t: the faint tremor running under her stillness. Hands resting a fraction too carefully in her lap. Because the names being lobbed around the car like punchlines — Anderson, Zack, Aiden — were not punchlines to Emily.
They were the men who had done, and tried to do, the things that did not leave a girl quickly, no matter how much time piled up behind them.
They’d been paid, thanks to Phei doing the punishing personally and he knew, in the cold old part of himself where such accounts were kept, that he would collect far more from them before he was finished.
But a bill settled and a wound healed were two different things.
Only time would close the second.
Time, and something beyond time, and him.
He would not rush her.
The girls felt it too, in their own way — and they were careful with it. Nobody lingered where it might cut.
Instead, they leaned, deliberately and lovingly, into the avenging — narrating in rich detail exactly what Phei had carved out of those three, so that Emily, listening, would know in her bones the precise dimensions of how safe she was and how thoroughly the debt had been honoured.
She said nothing. But the tremor eased by a degree, and her shoulder settled half an inch closer to Victoria’s, and that was enough.
’For now, that is enough.’
There had been the leap, too — the airport parking lot, the step he and Emily had taken together and not spoken of since.
Nothing had moved since but it was not the lack of time or chance to explore their feeling and finally Phei taking her first time the way she wanted him to.
The truth, which he admitted only to himself and only on the days he was feeling brave, was that he was the one afraid.
Maybe he was underestimating her — her resilience, her courage, the iron it had taken to simply survive.
Or maybe he was just terrified of becoming, by accident, by clumsiness, by wanting her too much and then himself becoming one more person who hurt her.
Either way: not yet.
He would not rush that, either.
She could also lie but to Phei, Emily was no yet healed from what had happened to her.
"What was wrong with Derek, though?" Victoria asked, breaking the moment cleanly. "Was it just me, or has he become even more pathetic? He spent the entire night standing with half his body tucked behind either Marcus or Danton. Like a toddler hiding behind a parent’s leg at a party full of strangers."
"He’s always like that," Delilah said.
"No! He’s got worse. At one point Danton took a step and Derek just — moved with him. Synchronized like a remora."
"A remora in a nine-thousand-dollar suit," Elena said. "The saddest fish in the ocean."
"Maybe he’s the smart one," Maddie offered. "Hiding behind the two biggest things in the room. That’s not cowardice, that’s real estate."
The cabin took up Derek’s general wretchedness with enthusiasm — the slumping, the shrinking, the boy’s apparent life ambition to occupy as little of the universe as physically possible.
Phei didn’t join in.
Because he could still hear, with perfect clarity, the thing Kyle had told him once — flat and unhurried, a man passing along a weather warning he didn’t expect to be believed.
’Derek is the most dangerous of them all.’
And so while the car laughed at the boy who hid behind boys, Phei sat with the quiet conviction that the slumped, diminished, harmless-looking creature at the back of the Circle was the one he understood least.
Which made him the one Phei watched most.
"Actually—" Delilah straightened, frowning, as though the thought had just snagged on something. "Hold on. What had gotten into Kyle last night? I mean it. Because I expected him to thrive in us against Marcus and other boys. Marcus winding up to do something catastrophic to us, in public? That’s Kyle’s favorite dish. He should have been sitting there with a napkin tucked in, basking. Instead, he leans in and defuses it?" She looked around the cabin.
"Since when does Kyle save anyone from anything?"
The car actually paused on that one and considered it. Maddie’s brow furrowed. Even Sierra tilted her head.
"Who knows," Phei said, with a light chuckle into his coffee. "Maybe he grew a few braincells. Maybe he was just saving his friend’s face. Really. Who’s to say."
It was a perfectly innocent sentence.
It was delivered with the perfect innocence of a man wiping fingerprints off a doorknob.
The car went silent.
Eleven pairs of eyes rotated toward him with the slow synchronized precision of a security system acquiring a target. Amber pushed herself up off his chest specifically to stare at him from closer range. Elena leaned around his arm. Madam Ashford’s brow performed a slow, devastating arch.
"...What did you do," Delilah said.
"Nothing."
"What did you do," Maddie said, delighted, already grinning, smelling blood and chaos in equal measure.
"I am a simple man enjoying my coffee."
"Phei." Sierra’s voice was flat as a frozen lake. "Your face is doing something."
"My face is doing nothing."
"Your face," Victoria said, "is doing the exact thing it did before the breakfast Marcus humiliation."
"My love," Madam Ashford said silkily, folding her hands, "the longer you protest, the worse we will assume it is."
Phei took a long, leisurely sip of his coffee, set the cup down on the center table with a soft definitive clink, and smiled the smile of a dragon sitting on a secret it had no intention of laying yet.
"Who knows," he said again, pleasantly.
The cabin erupted — accusations, Amber thumping his chest, Maddie declaring she would get it out of him via methods banned by several conventions — and the limousine rolled on through the golden afternoon carrying the sound of it, laughter spilling out into a day that had no idea yet what was coming for it.
When the noise finally banked down to embers, the talk drifted to the other princesses, to the plans for tonight and tomorrow, to the warm churning of schemes that filled any enclosed space containing Maddie Whitmore for longer than a minute.
"So." Maddie turned to him at last, and the smile that spread across her face was pure chaos demoness — wide, bright, and absolutely terrifying. "Are you ready, dragon? For what I’ve got in store for you?"
Because Maddie had not spent half of yesterday merely gossiping with the princesses. She’d kick-started her rebellion. Phase one was complete — sealed, delivered, beautiful. And phase two required precisely two things: Phei, and Phei.
He looked at her over Amber’s blonde head, and the smirk came back, slow and dark and delighted.
"I was starting to think," he said, "you’d never ask."
And Amber, tucked warm against his chest, felt it when the young dragon’s stirring beneath all that calm, a low coil of chaos waking and stretching, eager, hungry, entirely prepared to take a wrecking ball to the Legacy families and grin the whole way through.
His dragon was ready.
As far as anyone in that car could tell.
