Chapter 925: The Cliff Wearing White
The shoot was already in motion by the time the convoy crested the winding road, and the location introduced itself the way only obscene money can.
The mansion stood white and gleaming at the very crown of the cliff — less a building than a declaration of war upon modesty, perched upon a great shoulder of ancient rock that the lake below had been arguing with for ten thousand years and losing with quiet, geological grace.
The wind came up off the water in long soft pulls, carrying the sweet clean scent of the lake with it, cool and mineral and faintly green, threading through the manicured gardens and setting every hedge and flowerbed whispering like courtiers at a coronation.
Far below, out of sight but never out of hearing, the water crashed and crashed against the insurmountable rock in a slow patient rhythm, the sound rising up the cliff face like applause from an audience that had arrived several millennia early and still refused to leave.
The road snaked up the great hill in lazy coils, passing other mansions on its way — a few private residences belonging to rich men who valued their view more than their privacy, but most of them commercial properties, beautiful empty stages for hire.
The white one at the summit was today’s stage.
The shoot first; Phei’s interview after.
The mountain, presumably, had been booked through dinner.
And waiting at the entrance, clipboard in hand and professionalism on standby, stood Catherine — Ashford Madam’s assistant — had arrived prepared to greet her employer and was instead experiencing a small, private system failure.
Because as the car doors had opened, the dangerously beautiful boy had stepped out into the gold light of the afternoon, and the gold light had received him like a long-awaited guest who had finally deigned to appear.
The white shirt with its folded sleeves lay against him the way good tailoring dreams of lying against someone: the forearms bare and sun-warmed, tendons shifting under the skin with every offered hand, the open collar surrendering a sliver of chest and the silver chain that caught the afternoon and threw it back colder, sharper.
He moved down the line of doors with that unhurried, liquid economy of his — a hand offered, a waist steadied, each motion landing with the casual precision like he had never once in his life fumbled anything that mattered — and Catherine simply stood there dazed with her clipboard sagging.
Whatever script of greetings she’d rehearsed on the drive up dissolving quietly into static.
The sun, which should have known better, chose that moment to make him worse — falling across him at an angle so flattering it bordered on criminal conspiracy, gilding the dark hair, striking those amethyst eyes into something jeweled and frankly unconstitutional — and she could have sworn, hand on any holy book provided, that there was a faint halo of godliness sitting over his head.
The sun was showing off; it had picked a side.
And the women he was handing down — gods.
They emerged from the dark of the cars into the light one after another like a procession of competing arguments for the existence of a generous creator: a spill of pale gold hair here and a sleepy, sated smile; long legs unfolding there beneath swaying pleats; the lush, unhurried roll of hips in silk; a flash of midnight waves tossed back from a sharp lovely face; each of them distinct, each of them devastating in her own dialect, the whole collection moving through the gold air trailing perfume and low laughter.
The fact that most of them kissed him as they passed — briefly, warmly, on the lips, one after another like commuters tapping a card at a turnstile — should perhaps have deterred Catherine.
It threw her off by maybe a degree and a half before she recalibrated and kept staring.
There were, Catherine reasoned somewhere beneath conscious thought, worse queues to be at the back of.
And then her boss stepped down.
The Madam descended from the car like dusk descending on a coastline, unhurriedly, inevitable, rendering everything she touched more beautiful on contact.
The black gossamer of her gown drank the light and gave it back softened, chastened; the sapphire at her throat burned its single cold blue note against all that warm gold; and when she was gathered into his arm, settling against his side with the seamless grace of something returning to its rightful setting, the whole world around the two of them seemed to refresh itself.
’Purify.’
The light went cleaner, the air went sweeter, the gardens looked abruptly better-tended, and somewhere in the hedges a bird that had been singing perfectly well started over from the top, presumably feeling its earlier work no longer met the new standard.
Catherine, to her enormous credit, held on to more of her will than most of the people on that set:
Because Phei’s presence had begun to press outward the moment he’d stepped from the car — that quiet sovereign weight, the Dragon Dominance unfurling lazily from him and becoming one with the very air everyone breathed — and across the location the results were, in a word, catastrophic.
A lighting tech walked into his own light stand with the gentle confusion like he had forgotten which way was forward. A grip set down a case on his colleague’s foot and neither of them noticed for a full ten seconds.
A makeup artist with years’ experience applied blush to a model’s ear with the solemn concentration as though she were performing last rites. Two assistants collided gently, apologized to each other’s collarbones, and drifted apart again like punted rowboats on a lazy river.
The set had been a precision operation thirty seconds earlier. It was now a documentary about what happens to professionals when a dragon exhales in their postcode.
Phei, of course, paid the carnage no particular mind.
He greeted Catherine warmly — and then, with the goddess on his arm wearing the small, wicked smile of a co-conspirator, leaned in just slightly.
"You’ll want to close that," he advised, gently, nodding at her open mouth. "We’re near a lake. Things fly into mouths around lakes. Some of them have opinions."
Catherine’s jaw snapped shut with an audible click embarrassingly.
The goddess laughed and entirely without mercy for her assistant and Catherine resolved to die quietly at the next available opportunity, ideally somewhere with good lighting.
Phei left them to it and walked back along the convoy to the other cars.
Lydia and Catrina stood together beside the second vehicle, and between them, half a step back in that careful way of hers, Cassiopeia.
Phei looked at latter at the deliberate distance she still kept and sighed.
Then he simply crossed to her and pulled her into his arms, pressing a kiss into that flowing night-dark hair.
She went stiff for half a heartbeat, then melted into him by degrees, the way ice gives up an argument it had never truly believed in.
He drew back enough to look at her. "You alright?"
She nodded. "I— I’m sorry, I should have—"
His finger landed on her mouth — on that small, absurdly cute mouth — and pressed, light as a seal on warm wax. He shook his head once.
