[MAYA'S VAN – AFTER THE CALL]

Maya didn't ask why he hadn't walked straight up to her team when they arrived. Didn't ask why he'd ghosted back to the penthouse instead of letting the people who'd come to rescue him actually do it.

She already knew.

It was the same reason he'd called her and not the others.

He wanted this secret to live between just the two of them.

And the calculus wasn't complicated—not for someone raised in Paradise's gutters, who understood the rules better than the Legacies ever would.

Sierra would have charged in like righteous fire.

That is the problem.

Phei had run the numbers while blood still dripped from his split lip: Sierra didn't do subtle. Didn't do patience. She'd unleash the full Montgomery arsenal—lawyers, private investigators, media storms, whatever it took—and it would become Legacy war.

Montgomerys versus the other founding seven. Paradise split down the middle, everyone forced to pick a side.

And the cold truth?

Phei wasn't worth it to them.

Not to Sierra's family.

To them, he was the fling. The phase.

The charity case their daughter was slumming with until she got bored. They wouldn't risk their position, their alliances, their sacred spot in the hierarchy for some nobody she was fucking.

They'd tell her to drop it.

Move on.

Find someone appropriate.

And Sierra—beautiful, furious, loyal Sierra—would fight them tooth and nail. Might even try to go rogue. But in the end, she'd lose. Her family would rein her in. The Legacies would circle wagons. And Phei would be left exposed—seven founding families with unlimited resources gunning for the upstart who dared drag them into the light.

Not just the kids.

The parents.

Seven bloodlines with the kind of power that didn't bother with fair fights. They'd erased people before. Changed company CEOs, officials and higher. Car accidents. Overdoses. Suicides that weren't suicides. Tragedies so tidy no one ever looked twice.

What was Phei to them?

Not even a speck of dust.

The families wouldn't just punish him.

They'd erase him.

Like they'd erased others before.

They'd killed before.

Maya knew the whispers too. Everyone in Paradise knew this, even if they pretended not to. The whispers. The rumors. The kids from Downtown who'd crossed the wrong Legacy heir and just… vanished. Car accidents. Overdoses. Tragic circumstances that were never investigated too closely because investigating meant asking questions and asking questions meant threatening people who didn't like to be threatened.

The Legacies got away with it.

Every fucking time.

Because the only justice that existed in Paradise was Legacy against Legacy. Equal power. Mutually assured destruction. The understanding that if you came for one founding family, the others would wonder if they were next, and suddenly you had a real war on your hands.

But Phei wasn't a Legacy.

He was nobody.

And nobody didn't get justice. Nobody got revenge, or protection, or the luxury of fighting in the open where the rules might actually apply.

Nobody had to fight in the shadows.

Nobody had to be patient.

Nobody had to wait for the perfect moment and strike before anyone saw him coming, because if they saw him coming, he was already dead.

Maya understood all of this without Phei having to explain it.

She'd grown up in Paradise too, after all. Just Downtown Paradise, but same rules applied. She'd watched her own community learn the hard way that complaining about Legacy kids meant losing jobs, losing homes, losing everything until you either shut up or moved away.

She knew the math.

She knew why he was choosing silence over justice.

And she knew—with a certainty that settled into her bones like ice—that when he finally moved against them, it would be alone. In the dark. Where no one could help him, and no one could stop him, and the only witnesses would be the ones he was destroying.

Unless she gave him another option.

Unless she made herself useful enough, trustworthy enough, necessary enough that when the moment came, he'd let her stand beside him.

Not because he needed her.

But because he chose her.

The way he was choosing her right now.

Over Sierra.

Over everyone.

Maya sat in the silence, perfectly still, watching Paradise slide past through tinted windows.

The rambling disaster.

The secret empress.

Both real. Both her. Two sides of a coin most people never bothered to flip.

He called me.

The thought circled like a shark.

He trusted me.

Over her. Over the girlfriend. Over the one who gets to hold him and kiss him and hear him say "I love you."

He gave me the truth.

She should feel guilty about the warmth spreading through her chest. Should feel bad about the smile she couldn't quite suppress—small, private, edged with something that would have terrified anyone who really knew her.

But she didn't.

Not even a little.

Sierra could have the title. The spotlight. The "I love you"s whispered in the dark, the public dates, the performative possession that paraded him as hers for all of Paradise to see.

But Maya had something better.

She had his secrets.

His trust.

Most importantly if he moved and made moves with her against them... she did not make him vulnerable the way Sierra did.

And she hadn't had to scheme for any of it. Hadn't manipulated or plotted or played the vicious little games Paradise taught every ambitious girl from the cradle.

She'd simply been herself—the messy, silver-haired disaster who couldn't finish a sentence without tripping over her own tongue, who burned cookies into biohazards and confessed her hair-color crimes like mortal sins.

That was what made it perfect.

That was what made it lethal.

Because the Maya who rambled and blushed and apologised to furniture?

That girl was real.

And Phei—who had walls higher than cathedral spires, who trusted no one, who saw through every velvet lie this city draped over its knives—had let her in.

Not because she'd tricked him.

Because she was genuine.

The soft poison. The sweetest kind. The one you drank willingly, eagerly, because it tasted like salvation right up until it stopped your heart.

You think you've figured me out, Sierra.

You think I'm just the disaster. Just the comic relief. Just the sad little girl nursing a hopeless crush while you wear him like a crown.

Maya's reflection stared back at her from the tinted window—silver hair she'd changed for him, catching the city lights, soft features arranged in innocent repose, eyes that looked nothing like the rambling mess she performed at school.

Cold.

Patient.

Hungry.

Those bastards have no idea what's coming.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her team lead.

[Site cleaned. No evidence remaining. Do you need anything else tonight, Miss?]

She typed back without hesitation:

Begin building files on all the seven Legacy heirs. I am sending names. Everything. Finances, communications, movement patterns, vulnerabilities. I want weekly reports.

[Understood. Timeline?]

No rush. We're playing a long game.

She set the phone down.

Outside, the van glided through the gates of her family's estate—not the ostentatious Legacy mansions of Paradise proper, all glass and marble and screaming money, but something else entirely.

Something hidden. Something older.

Something that made the founding families look like nouveau riche pretenders playing dress-up with daddy's credit card.

Whenever you're ready, she'd told him.

I'll be there.

And she would be.

With resources he couldn't imagine. With power he didn't know existed. With a patience that had been sharpened over years of watching, waiting, wanting—biding her time behind the mask of the harmless, hopeless girl no one ever took seriously.

The rambling girl would wait because she didn't know what else to do.

The empress would wait because she knew exactly what she was waiting for.

Both were true.

Both were her.

And Phei Maxton—beautiful, broken, brilliant Phei—had just invited both of them into his war.

My sweet, Man. My Phei, Maya thought, and the smile that crossed her face was soft and terrifying in equal measure.

You have no idea what you've just unleashed.

But you will.

When you're ready.

I'll be there.

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