Chapter 1360: Homecoming

The penthouse was enormous and absurdly so; it was built less like an apartment at the summit of a tower and more like someone had taken a private palace, lifted it into the sky and wrapped it in glass. Yet with so many people gathered inside tonight, the place somehow felt smaller than usual, every couch, open stretch of polished floor and broad space near the windows occupied by someone who had found an excuse to be here.

Still, silence had become something of a unanimous decision they had all agreed upon without a single word.

Nobody had asked everyone to stop talking. There had been conversations when people first arrived, scattered laughter, occasional arguments and the usual little clusters forming among those who naturally gravitated toward one another, but those sounds had gradually died as time passed.

What remained was an anticipation so thick enough that even the enormous penthouse seemed to have quietened around them.

They were waiting for Phei.

Two weeks had passed since he disappeared from Hell’s Paradise Island, which should not have been very long considering the lives some people here had lived, yet Phei had an irritating talent for making his absence feel significantly larger than the amount of time involved:

There had been dinners where people instinctively expected his voice before remembering he was gone, mornings where Melissa, Maddie, Sierra, Delilah and others expected his presence when they woke up, throwing arms on their side to feel his warmth just to find none sometimes they someone almost messaged him out of habit and nights when Melissa reached through as if other was even connection between them simply to feel that he still existed somewhere beyond her reach.

Now Sienna had told them she was returning him to them.

But Phei had not been seen since Sienna left.

Not yet, anyway, although Sienna had told them enough to turn waiting into something considerably more difficult.

Melissa stood closest to the open center of the room with Maya’s small hand held securely inside hers. Elena remained a little behind her mother, while the Goddess stood on Melissa’s left, and without anyone deliberately arranging them that way, the four somehow became the point around which everyone else’s positions seemed to form.

Melissa had chosen a black dress to adorn herself in.

The long dress fitted her with elegant cruelty that made one wonder whether the designer had personally held a grudge against every other woman expected to stand near her. The smooth black fabric followed the generous fullness of her chest, cupping her breasts without making the dress exposing her body outwardly for anyone’s mind to wander before drawing inward around a waist that remained almost offensively narrow.

From there, her figure widened again into the rounded fullness of her hips, and the material continued downward in a long graceful fall that covered her legs while making very little effort to hide the shape underneath—

Her pregnancy had only added to her softness, elegancy and image of an empress holding the bedroom court of their returning emperor and close friends.

The little swell carrying Phei and Melissa’s child was visible now if someone knew to look for it, gently interrupting the otherwise dramatic line between waist and hips while somehow making Melissa appear even more womanly than before. There was something particularly arresting about seeing her dressed this beautifully while carrying his child, and two women standing behind her were currently learning that life was not always fair.

Maddie looked—

—while Sierra followed her gaze.

Both girl’s attention dropped lower to Melissa’s ass beneath that black dress.

Maddie stared for several seconds before glancing toward Sierra with the expression of someone who required confirmation that she was not imagining things. Sierra merely narrowed her eyes at Melissa’s backside before looking back at Maddie, and neither needed to say a word to know the other was experiencing exactly the same little petty feminine envy.

It wasn’t exactly envy in a negative manner but they each wished they had that!

If pregnancy was responsible, then apparently pregnancy had favorites now; unfortunately it was that. Melissa had always been the one with the hottest body among them.

Standing beside Melissa did not help the Goddess either, although for an entirely different reason.

She wore a long white gown that seemed almost designed around the strange contradiction of looking pure while making it impossible not to notice her body. The pale fabric gathered elegantly around her neck and shoulders before descending over the astonishing fullness of her chest, following the exquisite proportions of her waist and hips before flowing downward in a soft white fall toward the floor.

Every movement sent delicate folds through the dress, catching the penthouse lights and adding to the impression that the woman wearing it belonged somewhere considerably less ordinary than Earth.

Her beauty had always possessed that quality.

Other women could be stunning, seductive, adorable, regal or elegant, yet looking at the Goddess occasionally produced the uncomfortable impression that beauty itself had been built from slightly different rules around her.

Standing close to her meant accepting that someone’s eyes would inevitably compare for half a second before deciding comparison was a terrible idea if she was involved; from her divine bids to her otherworldly unmatched beauty.

Although Maya who was standing not too far from the Goddess and besides Melissa appeared entirely unbothered by having those two women beside her and simply held Melissa’s hand while looking toward the enormous glass wall whenever she sensed something Phei was doing that everyone else was oblivious about but her.

Behind Melissa, Maddie and Sierra had apparently attended the same imaginary meeting before getting dressed despite neither woman admitting any such coordination.

Sierra wore black, choosing a daring two-piece beneath a long dark coat. The upper piece fitted closely around her chest with thin straps over her shoulders, while the high-waisted skirt followed the curve of her hips before falling almost to her ankles. A long slit exposed one leg nearly to the thigh whenever she shifted her weight, and the open coat softened absolutely nothing because it merely framed the outfit beneath it.

Maddie had somehow arrived in almost the same idea rendered in deep wine red.

Her top gathered around the center of her chest while the matching skirt hugged her hips and opened into a high slit along one leg, with a long coat resting loosely around her shoulders instead of being properly worn. Standing near Sierra, she looked enough like the second half of a deliberately coordinated pair that several people had already asked whether they had planned it.

They had not.

That answer had not convinced nobody.

On the other hand; if there had been some hierarchy determining who stood where among Phei’s increasingly complicated harem, Catrina had probably broken it within minutes even before she took that last step with him!

She stood close enough to the center to belong there despite never appearing particularly concerned with whether anyone expected her to. Her white dress reached only a little above her thighs, leaving most of her legs exposed while somehow remaining elegant rather than cheap. The high neckline preserved a degree of refinement, though the fitted material did absolutely nothing to hide the fullness of her chest or the shape of her waist before ending over her thighs.

She looked confident enough that the outfit seemed less like something chosen to attract attention and more like something that simply assumed attention would arrive on its own.

Valentina stood close to Catrina, Emily occupying nearly the same amount of space on the other side, while Patricia predictably remained somewhere within easy reach of Valentina. Noor had joined them too, quieter than the others but clearly comfortable among the little group that had formed over the past couple of weeks.

Noor and Valentina had developed a surprisingly deep liking for one another.

Perhaps two threesomes with the same man had simply accelerated friendship; after all how could they not given what they’d done to each other and their combined effort to give Phei the best threesome he’d ever had.

Of course he’d not told them if they’d succeeded at that; they were really good even more on that second one!

Those two threesomes had been the biggest foundation for these two’s relationships as friends.

There were probably books somewhere claiming shared hobbies and mutual interests were the foundations of strong relationships, but Phei’s household had never shown much respect for conventional social research.

Valentina’s fiery and daring personality had somehow meshed perfectly with Noor’s quieter nature, while Patricia possessed enough of Noor’s reserved disposition that the three women had begun fitting naturally around one another.

Valentina remained the fire between them, of course.

She teased first, challenged first, laughed loudest and seemed responsible for at least half the occasions when Patricia or Noor ended up doing something neither woman would have initiated alone.

Even so, Noor’s eyes naturally found Soraya.

No amount of new friendship was ever going to change where Soraya stood in her heart.

They were closer than ordinary friends and had long since fallen into something more sisterly, which was why Noor had been quietly relieved that Soraya had never displayed the kind of jealousy some people developed when their closest person started becoming close to others—

If anything, Soraya treated Valentina and Patricia like Noor had simply brought two more women into the family and expected everyone to get along.

That was one of the things Noor loved most about her.

Soraya had managed to enter Phei’s chaotic collection of relationships and somehow decide everybody was her sister until proven otherwise.

Melissa occupied an especially funny position within that system in Soraya’s created system for this harem.

Soraya treated her almost like some sort of empress.

Noor’s lips curved when she remembered Soraya actually bowing to Melissa once and had addressed her that way with enough theatrical seriousness that almost everyone present had burst out laughing.

’That’s what she calls her, right?’

Empress.

’Definitely Empress.’