Chapter 910: Gods Don’t Rest
Chapter 910: Gods Don’t Rest
Eira could tell it had taken Phei longer than he’d budgeted, untangling Cassiopeia and the elaborate barbed-wire installation she insisted on calling a personal life — long enough that the guilt had stopped behaving like a guest and started behaving like a tenant.
It had moved in. Unpacked. Hung something tasteful on the wall of his chest, just left of the sternum, and signed a lease Eira had a sick suspicion ran several years with no break clause.
’Melissa, though.’
He hadn’t seen her cry. That was the part that wouldn’t leave him alone and kept turning over in the back of his skull like a stone he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue.
He hadn’t been there when Melissa had been alone with whatever the day had handed her.
And he could see it. That was the obscene part. He could build the whole thing behind his eyes with the precision of a man who knew her too well to be spared the details.
And Melissa didn’t weep at what had happened between her and Cassiopeia, she kept everything to herself silently, immaculately, with the spine of a woman who’d lost a child and buried a brother and twenty years of her own swallowed screaming and had concluded, somewhere down the line, that her grief was nobody’s inheritance to spend.
She’d have stood at a window and Eira was almost certain of the window, as kept her face composed until the precise instant she was sure no one was looking, and then — only then — let it come, two thin lines of silver and not one breath out of rhythm to betray them.
Crying like she was ashamed of the water; like even her sorrow had to be tidy enough to deny later.
’And I wasn’t there to soften it for her. To barge in and make it bearable and human. To give her something to be happy at instead of something to mourn.’ Eira silently watched Phei’s face as he thought all that.
Eira has seen how that woman spent a decade slipping into his room to hold him through nightmares he’d thought he was suffering alone — and the one night the math reversed, the one night the holding should have run the other way, he’d not been there and only arrived later.
’Funny, that. The existence had spent eons forging a weapon and then handed it a single weakness shaped exactly like his dead father’s youngest sister, and the weapon kept finding itself two cities away at all the wrong hours.’
Eira almost laughed at the irony.
’Come to think of it, maybe Melissa was the only living soul who could reduce Master to this — soft in the gut, sick over a thing he hadn’t even witnessed, gutted by a reconstruction.’
’Or—’ and the thought sauntered in uninvited, the way the genuinely vile ones always did — ’maybe it is all of them.’
Every woman who’d let him past the moat.
Maybe he simply hasn’t yet found the precise hairline fracture in the others that, struck cleanly to produce the same silent silver weeping at the same undeserving window.’
’Charming. Truly, Master should aspire to catalogue exactly which private grief he’s absent for. Patriarch of the century. They’ll erect a statue, and the pigeons will give it the review it earns.’
She hoped not. Devoutly.
And with Roxanne and Sierra about to occupy the same square footage, breathe the same overcharged air — that one wasn’t going to land softly either.
’Maddie tooo has already started the mother-daughter arrangement with the serenity of a woman who’d long since decided chaos was less a misfortune than a personal brand.’
Sierra was colder cloth. She laughed about it — loud, bright, convincing, the laugh of someone who’d rehearsed — but Sierra kept things, folding them small and shelved them behind that surgical composure where nobody got to read the labels.
Eira’d noticed.
But that was tomorrow’s funeral, embalmed in advance.
As things stood, Roxanne and Melissa wouldn’t be darkening Hell’s Paradise anytime soon regardless. Yesterday he’d been set to collect the pair of them from Roxanne’s apartment back in Paradise — and then Melissa had called:
They needed more time. For bonding.
’Bonding.’ she nearly choked on their lie. Two grown women who, the last time they’d shared a dinner table, had attempted to vivisect each other with adjectives.
’Bonding. Sure. Master’s three weeks from a quiet retirement to a vineyard.’
He’d clocked the lie the instant her voice tilted on the word — not because she lied badly, Melissa lied with the effortless grace of a woman who’d never once been caught, but because he was unfairly good at hearing the seams.
’Either Roxanne isn’t ready to stand in front of her own daughter — not that the woman owed Sierra a single syllable about what passed between her Marked soul and his — or it is the other thing.’
’Because when, precisely, has the universe declined the chance to hand Master one exquisitely-timed irony, ribbon curled, a little card reading "with love and contempt"?’
Whatever it was, he’d wait. Watch. Let it surface in its own grotesque time.
And by the hour they returned he’d have his own surprise polished to a lethal shine — something to make it up to Melissa in the manner she was owed, which was extravagantly and, if she’d permit it, on his knees.
’The girl’s mother is next in the queue: Madeleine. The matriarch herself.
Gods. Master don’t rest, does he? Like — ever. He’ll work his way through three generations of one family and the only constant thread will be his own pathological inability to leave well enough alone. They’ll write theses. Unkind ones, with footnotes.’
Eira smiled at the deranged cathedral of consequence he’d raised with his own two hands and a smile women apparently couldn’t legislate against.
Phei though had made the call the way he made most of his civilisation-adjacent decisions — quietly, half a beat ahead of fully thinking it through to throttle the Madeleine plan.
’A notch or two.’
First, he’d decided he’d have to talk to Melissa; a real conversation. Eye contact, the works as they unravel the uncomfortable honesty he performed magnificently and meant only on the rare Tuesday.
Whatever fell out of that would tell him whether to move now onto Madeleine or let the matriarch ripen and begin once the timing stopped resembling a blade held lovingly to Melissa’s own throat.
For now, though, today was spectacularly idiotic day, assembled by people in tailored blazers who said synergy with their whole chest; was the shoot and the television interview.
And — threaded through both like a migraine with its own publicist — the urgent covert operation to quietly euthanize his celebrity career before it metastasised into something requiring a manager and a skincare line.
He didn’t have time for it.
The modest slice of fame he’d already accrued was plenty — plenty exhausting, plenty invasive, more than enough to feel lenses crawling over his skin in the street like very polite parasites.
And now there was commercial work. Bookings. Brand sit-downs. Someone, somewhere, was at this moment drafting an email containing the phrase brand DNA about his jawline.
’Master would rather strangle the thing in its crib.’
He didn’t want to be a celebrity, or a model, or a face on the side of a building, or a man with a stylist who held opinions about his cheekbones.
That had been a younger man’s daydream — technically weeks old, days if he was scrupulous, and he tried to be on alternate but Phei’d outgrown it the way you outgrow a coat: all at once, seams biting the shoulders before you’d registered you’d got bigger. And meaner. And significantly harder to kill.
’Women. Power. And — well...’
Those things were worth more than every flashbulb in the hemisphere fused into one.
But.
’First — let’s see how today decides to end.’
Eira had the grim, growing suspicion the universe had already finished writing the punchline, and was merely waiting, politely, for him to walk in and stand on the X.