The balcony air tasted like jasmine and smog—LA's signature cologne, pollution married to flowers in a relationship that shouldn't work but somehow did. The mansion sprawled below us, all warm lights and architectural excess, the kind of home that whispered generational wealth even though I'd bought it three months ago with supernatural currency.

Aunt Jasmine leaned against the railing, wine glass dangling from fingers that had stopped shaking about twenty minutes ago.

She'd been processing for the last hours I've been away—silent settled between us she was... overwhelmed, occasionally making sounds that were half-laugh, half-disbelief, like her brain was buffering and couldn't decide which emotion to load first.

"I still can't believe it," she finally said, voice carrying that edge of someone who'd accepted the impossible but hadn't made peace with it yet.

"All this money. You bought Linda a mansion." She gestured at the house like it might disappear if she stopped acknowledging it was real. "A fucking mansion in Lincoln Heights' most expensive neighborhood. Not a house. Not a nice house. A mansion."

I sipped my wine—some vintage that cost more than my old life and tasted like liquid validation. "Mom deserves it."

"She does. She absolutely does." Jasmine turned to look at me, eyes catching the ambient light in ways that made them look more gold than brown. "But that's not even the part I can't process, Peter. It's—" She stopped. Laughed. The kind of laugh that said she'd seen something her brain couldn't file properly.

"It's that estate."

I smiled despite myself. "My place?"

"Oh my God, the estate." She said it like a prayer, like blasphemy, like both simultaneously. "Where we all stayed after the shooting. Where I spent hours trying to understand what the fuck was happening to my life." She took a long drink of wine.

"Peter, that place looked both futuristic and ancient from the outside. Like someone built a temple to tomorrow using blueprints from Atlantis. And inside?"

She shook her head, blonde hair catching moonlight and city glow, the strands brushing her bare shoulders with a whisper that felt louder than it should.

"Inside it was out of this world. High-tech doesn't even cover it. I felt like I'd walked onto the set of a sci-fi movie except everything actually worked. The security systems. The medical bays—yes, the fucking medical bay because apparently you just casually have hospital-grade equipment in your basement. The AI that runs everything."

She paused. "ARIA, right? She sounds like she could launch nuclear missiles if she got bored, by the way."

"She could," I admitted. "But she'd make it entertaining."

Jasmine laughed again—that breathless sound of someone whose reality had been systematically demolished and rebuilt in the last few hours. She set her wine glass on the railing, turned to face me fully, and then—without warning—reached up and held my face between her hands.

Her palms were warm. Soft. The gesture so unexpectedly tender it made my chest tight, the heat of her skin seeping into mine like a slow-burning fuse.

"But Pete... How?" she asked, searching my eyes like the answer was written in my irises if she looked hard enough. "How did you get all those women? Twenty-plus women, Peter. Twenty-plus."

I couldn't help it.

I chuckled.

She'd seen everything. Of course she had. Madison had probably given her the full tour—the kind of tour you give someone when you want them to understand exactly what they're dealing with and loop them into it like registering them into a cult but showing them advantages first.

"I didn't believe you on your birthday," she continued, thumbs brushing my cheekbones in a way that felt more intimate than it should, the pads of her fingers tracing the line of my jaw with a feather-light pressure that sent electricity straight to my spine.

"When you mentioned having multiple girlfriends, I thought you were exaggerating. Being a cocky teenage boy. But then I stayed there for hours, Peter. Saw the pictures."

Her voice dropped, husky now, the sound curling in the air between us like smoke.

"Insane pictures, by the way. Professional-quality nude photography of you with all of them. Each one of them. In their bedrooms and entire estate but the living room. At least that was kept with normal pictures."

Ah, really Madison did take it too far. It was no wonder her brain was short circuiting.

She paused, something flickering across her face—shock mixed with fascination mixed with something else I couldn't quite name, something that made her pupils dilate just a fraction wider.

"And that room. The one Madison showed me." Her cheeks flushed slightly, a slow bloom of color that started at her collarbone and crept upward. "Very enthusiastically. Very proudly. Like she was giving me a tour of the Sistine Chapel except instead of religious art, it was—"

"I know which room you mean," I said, grin splitting my face because of course Madison had shown her. Of course she had.

My queen did love making statements.

The Sex Room had been my bedroom originally—absurdly large, the bed a monument to excess.

But the women had converted it, made it their temple. Now my actual bedroom was for softer things. Cuddles. The whole harem piling in like we were filming a rom-com about polyamory. But I wasn't about to explain our sleeping arrangements to my aunt.

The Sex Room was where we held orgies and kinks. It was actually Rebecca's favorite room than her own bedroom.

Jasmine stared at me. "You're actually proud of this."

"Damn right I am." I leaned against the railing beside her, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from her skin, the faint tremor in her breathing.

"It's an achievement. A logistical miracle. Do you know how hard it is to manage that many relationships?"

She turned to look at me, something between disbelief and fascination in her expression. "Okay. I have to ask. How does this whole harem thing even work?"

I considered the question, swirling wine in my glass like I was contemplating philosophy instead of explaining supernatural polyamory to my aunt who'd walked into my life expecting normal teenage problems and found cosmic-level complications instead.

"It's like asking God how He can create life out of nothing," I finally said.

Jasmine blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You heard me."

"Are you seriously comparing yourself to God right now?" She laughed—incredulous, delighted, slightly horrified. "Do you hear how absurd that sounds?"

I shook my head, grin widening because this was the part where I got to be completely ridiculous and completely honest simultaneously. "I'm not comparing myself to God. I'm telling you I am becoming a god. Specifically, the God of Harem and Sex." I paused for effect.

"High Pope of the Liberation Church."

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