Chapter 926: Scaled and Thriving, Evy’s Presence
"It’s alright."
That was all and everything, Cassiopeia looked at him a moment longer, something in her shoulders setting down a piece of invisible luggage it had been shouldering since yesterday, and then she went, on her own feet, by her own choice to join his other women where they gathered near the entrance.
Maddie absorbed her into the group mid-sentence without breaking stride, which was, by Maddie’s standards, a coronation.
That left Lydia and Catrina.
Lydia looked at the two of them at the way they were looking at each other.
She performed the rapid social calculus; she knew exactly which conversations she was not required for and found her solace in the company of literally anyone else, and walked off toward the gardens with the unhurried dignity, choosing a different ballroom letting her friend have her moment with Phei.
She’ll get her own when the time came.
Phei turned to Catrina.
It hadn’t sat well with him, finding her in the second car — though he understood it.
It was a reflex, for Catrina, probably for not joining his women just because she’d had a few orgasms from him in the morning.
He hadn’t been there to walk her in, hadn’t yet stood her in front of the others and said the words that made a place for her, and Catrina was not a woman who took seats she hadn’t been offered.
So, Phei took her hand, drew her in against him for a moment, then turned and led her unhurriedly and unmistakable towards where everyone stood.
And Catrina, reading exactly what was coming the way one reads an oncoming wave, felt a tremor go straight through her body from heels to scalp.
Because this was it. The introduction. The formal presentation. The moment she was officially married—
’Get a hold of yourself!’ she hissed at her own mind, scandalised. ’Married? MARRIED? It’s an introduction, you absolute disgrace, he’s going to say your NAME to some people, nobody has produced a ring, there is no officiant, the gazebo is not decorated—’
and the fact that her treacherous brain had already noted the gazebo could be decorated was a separate crisis she kept for later.
Her face, mercifully, betrayed none of the wedding. Mostly.
"He really is a dragon, huh," Nastya commented, watching the procession from beside David, arms folded while her tone landed somewhere between anthropology, jealous and awe.
David nodded sagely. "What I want to know is the final number. How many women does he end this little vacation with? I’m thinking we open a betting pool. I’ll set the line at—"
"You’ll be the first to know, won’t you?" said a pleasant voice beside him. "Given you’re recording everything."
David went very still. Then, with the fluid nonchalance, like he’d practiced this exact motion until it was muscle memory, he lowered the phone he’d had angled at the group and slid it into his pocket, turning to face Brian’s serene, knowing smile.
He cleared his throat. "That was — for focus testing. B-roll. Archival purposes. Historians will thank me. When they write the documentary about all this, do you want the early episodes to be blurry? Is that the legacy you want, Brian?"
"The documentary," Brian repeated.
"Working title: Scaled and Thriving. I’m workshopping it."
The group lost it, Landon wiped his eyes and pointed at David. "He’s going to be narrating our funerals through that phone. ’Day forty-three. The dragon has acquired another. Morale among the single men remains... theoretical.’"
Rhea, tucked under Brian’s arm, laughed so hard she had to hold onto him, and Cherry threw a grape at David’s head, which he caught — on camera, because the phone was somehow out again.
Around them all, the location breathed.
The wind kept coming up off the lake in those long sweet pulls, cool against sun-warmed skin, carrying the green mineral smell of deep water and the faint perfume of the gardens — cut grass, roses somewhere out of sight, the dry resinous warmth of cypresses standing in their dark formal rows.
The crash and hush of the water against the rocks far below kept its ancient time beneath every conversation.
Gold light lay across the white mansion’s face and made it glow; staff and crew moved through the great gardens like deckhands on a ship of grass; and high above it all the sun continued its open favouritism, following one particular dark-haired figure across the lawn like a spotlight with a crush.
And among the available people on that busy, beautiful set — stationed under a canopy with her crew fussing around her, a brush at her cheek, a comb at her hair — sat a particular girl whose face was running through a private gallery of emotions at a speed her makeup team found professionally alarming.
Evy.
And Evy, it must be said plainly, was not set dressing.
She was the kind of beautiful that production companies built schedules around — a tumble of rich multicolored hair currently being coaxed into glossy waves, skin with a warm honeyed luminosity that made half the lighting rig redundant, and a face assembled with the sort of insolent symmetry that had been opening doors and closing arguments for her since adolescence: full mouth, fine straight nose, large dark doe eyes that could perform innocence at award-winning levels while the mind behind them ran cold calculations.
Below the neck the argument only strengthened — a figure of her young generous emphatic curves poured into the silk robe the wardrobe team had her in, the swell of her chest testing the loosely tied sash with every aggravated breath, long smooth legs crossed and recrossing as her agitation climbed.
She was, on any ordinary set, on any ordinary day, the gravitational center of every camera and every gaze in attendance.
Today was not an ordinary day and therein lay the entire crisis.
Evy watched the handsome subject of her entire recent inner life arrive with a battalion of gorgeous people — beautiful people, offensively, redundantly beautiful people — and at the centre of them, the very woman who had hired her.
And the way they all held each other, orbited him.
Even her employer’s daughter — Elena Ashford herself who was tucked against his side, was, beyond a single shadow of a doubt, in love with him.
It was written on the princess in font sizes visible from the canopy.
Now — in fairness, and Evy was always scrupulously fair to herself, it was among her finest qualities — Evy was beautiful, more beautiful than Elena, arguably. As beautiful as most of that glittering battalion, on a good day with the right lighting, certainly.
But the Ashford Madam herself? She watched the Madam ascend the mansion’s front stairs on his arm while he steady her, only for her to lean into him; she watched the two of them move together like one beautifully constructed sentence — and conceded, with the bitter professional honesty of one artist appraising another’s masterpiece, that this was a tier she could study but not contest.
Her face grew steadily, traitorously redder as the depth of her situation re-revealed itself, and with it the full, mortifying dimensions of exactly how delusional she had been yesterday.
Yesterday. Gods. Yesterday she’d heluded herself to think he was her stalker and she was way to beautiful than anything he’d ever seen, so much that him being her stalker was "inevitable."
The cold breeze threading through the manicured gardens was at this moment, the only force in nature preventing visible smoke from rising off her embarrassed face. Her makeup artist paused, frowned, and reached for a different shade of powder.
Evy waved her off.
No.
No, this changed nothing.
It simply restructured the timeline.
What Ashley had given her about Phei was not going to be enough.
Not remotely, it did not explain that and could not account for a man who made the sun commit open favoritism and seasoned assistants forget the function of their own jaws; who walked through a garden and left the air behind him faintly charged, like the aftermath of summer lightning; who had somehow gathered an empire’s worth of extraordinary, luminous, mutually impossible women and taught them all to look at him like the answer to questions they’d long since stopped permitting themselves to ask.
She hated second-hand information anyway. Always had.
Borrowed knowledge was like borrowed jewellery; it glittered, but it never quite sat right at the throat.
She would find out who her handsome mystery really was. What he was. Why he was. All of it, down to the marrow —
’Personally.’
