Chapter 905: The Dragon Heart Scale Mystery
Chapter 905: The Dragon Heart Scale Mystery
Years later, she had stood inside a ritual that made Danton what he was now.
By then, she had become useful enough for family to draw closer. That was how trust worked among the Maxtons. It did not mean affection or confidence. Her family trusted people the way a butcher trusted a sharp knife, which meant they expected it to cut where guided and remain silent afterward.
Cassiopeia had helped wake the Prince.
That placed her inside the core circle, a tan bit closer than her mother had been ever let in, who had retreated from everything to do with that family long ago into the quiet country of her own suffering, and closer than other women in the Maxton family.
Cassiopeia had been made useful, and in that family usefulness was a collar worn under silk.
The choice had never been a choice in any meaningful sense.
Still, she had stood there.
Her hands had been present.
That mattered.
But the matter of Phei’s parents had caught her differently at the very day of the ritual.
Harold’s involvement had not surprised her. Anyone with working eyes and a brain not ornamental enough for display had understood the car crash for what it was:
A staged tragedy.
Like a ravine turned into theatre and grief dressed for public consumption. The Legacy excelled at such productions, Paradise could make even murder look like weather if the family crest was old enough.
What stunned Cassiopeia was the Dragon Heart Scale.
Somehow they had managed to extract it and absorb into the deeper Maxton machinery without the whole world hearing the scream of what such a thing implied.
That detail widened the crime beyond anything she had understood:
It meant the Maxtons had not merely arranged a death; they had somehow reached into the Phei’s father’s body while everything was happening and extracted the on of the most important sacred inheritance of a dragon and taken something that should never have been touched.
It meant the operation had been planned with knowledge, access, and really someone so monstrously powerful enough to do that, that even Cassiopeia felt cold considering how anyone can pull of such robbery during an accident.
She had known her family was cruel.
She had not understood the size of their hands and the reach in their resources.
Eira slapped her when the truth surfaced.
An actual slap.
A tiny ancient hand striking a Maxton with enough contempt to make the room feel suddenly underdressed. Then came Eira’s dry, merciless question: where exactly did Cassiopeia imagine a Dragon Heart Scale had come from, if Maxton hands had not arranged the entire production from beginning to end?
The answer was obvious.
Nowhere else.
It could only have been them.
But there was a difference between reaching a conclusion and standing before everything that conclusion revealed.
A person could say the words and still not be ready for the room they opened.
Cassiopeia had never fully measured the Maxtons beyond the familiar theatre of Legacy cruelty. Cruel marriages. Strategic ruin, smiling threats poured over tea and blackmail served with dessert.
The usual aristocratic circus, merely upgraded with better wine and more corpses beneath the floor.
This was larger.
Older.
Though fairness, unpopular little creature that it was, required admitting Phei and Eira had been in the dark as well. They had known Harold sat somewhere near the center of the web. They had known the Maxtons were involved.
But only hours ago had Phei understood the truth and had Eira who begun tracing the true sinew of it, thread by thread, figuring out whose hands moved behind which curtain.
Most of the stage remained unlit.
Ignorance still did not buy innocence.
No court worth fearing accepted that payment.
That was the second weight pressing on Cassiopeia’s chest whenever the room grew quiet.
The blood on her family’s hands had reached hers.
Maybe only a few drops.
That distinction comforted no one.
Blood stained whether one opened the wound or merely stood close enough to be marked by the spray. Cassiopeia had been too weak to even think to prevent the earliest crimes. Later, she had been old enough to recognise the shape of them and still choose silence.
That silence had a taste. Copper and etiquette. A very Maxton flavour.
She would have to pay for those drops.
If she ever wanted to look at her hands without seeing the family name beneath her nails, the debt had to be paid. Phei had already begun collecting it with terrifying patience. His smile had become cold arithmetic. His words arrived soft, almost gentle, until their meaning slid out from beneath them with a blade’s edge.
But the Maxtons were nowhere near finished.
They kept reaching for more wanting to even bind the child after taking the parents: Just adjusting, like a predator noticing that the small shape it had ignored in the grass might have been growing teeth.
They also believed he was miscalculating because he was showing too much.
But he was letting them think he could be engaged, pressured, studied, perhaps cornered. That was useful. Phei wanted their confidence alive for a little longer. Overconfidence was such a generous disease.
It made powerful people walk into knives while complaining about the lighting.
The misunderstanding almost amused him.
The Maxtons had mistaken him for an instrument:
Something made to be used, stepped on, and discarded. Something that would gather scraps with grateful hands, because in families like theirs even punishment could be disguised as attention, and those starved long enough could mistake cruelty for proof they still mattered.
’Do I look that harmless to them?’
Probably.
What else were they supposed to think when more than two women who used to torment him now belonged to him?
Like Sierra, Delilah.
Both had been part of the old machine built to grind him down but Phei understood them better than most. But from the outside, the shape looked absurd. Women once connected to his suffering now stood inside his orbit, marked, bonded, loyal, tied to him in ways the Maxtons would not understand until understanding became expensive.
’From a distance,’ he would admit, ’it really does look like a condition.’
Some incurable habit of reaching into broken places and pulling out people everyone else knew had been his hell; a need to mend what had been twisted and perhaps a refusal to believe darkness had the final claim simply because it had arrived first.
Eira had opinions on this.
Loud ones.
She called it his syndrome, with the vicious affection only a tiny ancient creature could make sound both insulting and heartbreakingly accurate. According to her, he collected damaged souls the way other young men collected trophies, then looked personally offended when the damage behaved like damage.
"You gather wounded birds, my master," she had told him once, amusement bright in her voice and something sharper hiding beneath it. "Then you act surprised when others think the same bird will open you with their claws at you."
He had dismissed it then.
Naturally.
Young men had been dismissing accurate warnings since the dawn of language. Dragons, apparently, improved the scale of the problem without solving the root defect. Very impressive. A grand advancement for stupidity.
But Eira had not stopped there.
She asked him something afterward when he asked himself why the Legacies had even hated him when he’d never done anything to them, even the girls.
At first, the question sounded idle, almost playful, as if she were tossing a pebble into conversation to see how it landed.
Yet the longer it remained in the air, the more weight it gained. It became one of those questions that did not demand an answer immediately because it had already begun working under the skin.
She asked him what Pixie Fairies feared most.
Phei had asked her to repeat it.
Eira looked at him then with eyes older than maps, older than the first borders men drew because they had mistaken dirt for destiny.
Her voice sank into a register that made his spine recognise something vast waking behind her little form.
"What do Pixie Fairies fear most, Master?"