Phei stood in the living room of the penthouse—his penthouse now, a phrase that still tasted foreign on the tongue, like a borrowed identity he hadn't quite grown into—staring at the grand piano that dominated the corner near the floor-to-ceiling windows.

A Steinway.

Black lacquer so flawlessly polished it reflected the city lights below like a dark, liquid mirror—an obsidian lake capturing the neon heartbeat of Paradise.

It looked like it belonged in concert halls or the private salons of oligarchs who collected virtuosos the way others collected vintage cars.

Melissa had placed it here.

He didn't know why.

Had she known that he never stopped playing—even after that incident, even after his parents' deaths, even when grief had hollowed him out and left nothing but sharp edges?

All those years in the Maxton house, waiting until the mansion was empty—Harold at the office, the children at school or parties, Melissa at her wine-soaked luncheons with the other Paradise wives—and then slipping into the study to the old upright nobody touched.

The decorative relic that existed purely for the aesthetic of cultured wealth the Maxtons performed without ever actually possessing culture.

He had continued teaching himself.

YouTube tutorials at first, then pilfered library books, then pure, obsessive devotion. Then online tutors Maria helped him pay. Hours compressed into stolen moments when the house held its breath.

Fingers learning shapes no one had ever guided them into after he'd publicly quit after that incident and his parents died.

Ears developing an instinct for harmony that felt less like acquisition and more like remembrance—as though the music had always lived in his bones, waiting for permission to surface.

He had become better than he was young at six.

Really good.

The kind of good that could have been a life—a scholarship to Juilliard, a career, an escape hatch from Paradise and its poisoned hierarchies. But he had never pursued it. Never told a soul. Never let the Maxtons glimpse that fragile, beautiful part of him.

Because Harold would never let him. Dude was at this point obsessed.

Also, because revealing something you loved to people like them was merely handing them a loaded gun and daring them not to shoot.

They would have taken it from him.

They took everything else.

But Melissa had installed a concert-grand Steinway in the penthouse.

Before he had even moved in.

Had she known all along?

Had she watched through some hidden cameras, or heard him through the walls when she returned early from her charity galas, and simply… never spoken of it? Never betrayed his secret to Harold? Never wielded it as another blade in the endless campaign of casual cruelty?

If that were true—

Phei's jaw clenched, a muscle ticking beneath the fading bruise.

If that were true, then what did it mean? That beneath a decade of indifference and complicity, some fractured part of her had been… protecting him? Shielding his one pure refuge from the rest of the family's predation?

Or was it merely elaborate theatre? The dutiful wife playing her role in tormenting the unwanted nephew so Harold wouldn't have to soil his own hands?

He didn't know which answer would hurt more.

The first would paint Melissa as a woman who expressed love through calculated absence and silent sabotage—fucked up beyond comprehension. The second would mean ten years of calculated suffering had been performance, and that someone in that house had cared enough to pretend cruelty rather than inflict care openly.

A treacherous, tiny part of him hoped it wasn't for the latter anyway, which was weird of him.

But he hoped she did not care at all by then, because at least it would mean he hadn't been entirely alone. and she'd been caring for him under the guise of hate while she hated her.

I need to look into this, he thought. Into who Melissa was before she became… whatever she is now. What she was really doing all those years.

But not tonight.

Phei walked to the piano and sat down on the bench.

The leather was cool against his still-healing body. His ribs ached with a dull, persistent throb—Healing Touch working overtime, knitting bone and tissue with stubborn patience, but some damage lingered like an unwelcome guest who refused to take the hint.

He ran his fingers along the keys without pressing them. Felt the smooth ivory beneath his fingertips, the familiar geometry of black and white that had been his only sanctuary for years. The instrument breathed beneath his touch—responsive, alive, waiting.

The Seven Legacies.

They were forging a monster.

Poking and prodding at something dormant inside him, too arrogant, too blinded by their inherited invincibility to realise what they were awakening.

And tonight, they had crossed the final line. Phei had never sought open war.

He knew their capabilities—knew them intimately, from the inside out.

The hired thugs had done the bulk of the work in that construction-site hell—professional muscle paid to break bones and ask no questions. But the Seven had been there too. Personally. Watching. Participating when the mood struck. Brett and Danton's boot to his ribs. Anderson's bat across his back. Derek's casual laugh as he ground a heel into Phei's hand which now were fine to play thank to the healing.

Zack holding him down while the others took turns.

All of them circling like hyenas, savoring the sport of it.

At their orders, the thugs had beaten him for so long he didn't know how long even.

At their leisure, the Legacies had joined in.

Kyle.

The name surfaced like a corpse bobbing to the surface of black water, bringing with it the memory—not Phei's own, but assembled from fragments: overheard boasts, drunken confessions, the kind of careless bragging Legacy boys indulged in when they thought no one who mattered was listening and the things he found out after digging.

There had been a kid. Downtown Paradise. Wrong side of everything. He'd committed some unforgivable sin—looked at the wrong girl, talked back to the wrong heir, simply existed too loudly in a space reserved for gods?

It hadn't mattered what.

What mattered was the aftermath.

Kyle behind the wheel, the others packed in the car like it was a joyride. Engine revving. Laughter thick with alcohol and entitlement. The kid walking home alone.

Thump.

Then silence.

No investigation worth the name. No charges. Just the well-oiled machinery of money and influence grinding the truth into dust. Kyle took the nominal fall—protection, not punishment. His family buried the case deeper than the body. Paid off witnesses. Terrorised the victim's relatives through the police.

Found some convenient scapegoat to rot in prison with promises of money.

A month later, the dead kid's family had vanished from Paradise entirely—relocated, silenced, erased?

And Kyle slept like a baby.

They all did.

That was the part Phei still couldn't metabolise. Not just the killing itself and how they were casual with taking a life at such young age—he'd grown up in Paradise; he understood what unchecked power could purchase—but the aftermath.

The casual return to normalcy. The laughter in the hallways the next day. The complete, chilling absence of remorse.

And that was only the recent one.

The "Boss"—whoever pulled their strings—had a body count of ten.

Ten lives extinguished like candles at the end of a party.

Phei's fingers found middle C and pressed down. The note rang out—pure, crystalline, perfect in the empty penthouse.

How did someone accumulate ten corpses and still look themselves in the mirror? How did they eat breakfast, kiss their mothers, laugh at jokes? How did they sleep without the dead crawling into their dreams?

He didn't understand.

Bu he was also grateful, in some twisted way, that he didn't. The only thing he had ever appreciated about Harold Maxton was the single, ironclad rule drilled into Danton from childhood:

If you ever kill, you will cease to be a Maxton.

Direct. Non-negotiable. The one line even Harold's monstrous indulgence wouldn't cross.

Danton had been allowed everything else—the beatings, the humiliations, the decade-long campaign of casual sadism that had been Phei's daily bread. But murder was forbidden.

A very small mercy.

Microscopic, really.

But had Danton, really never killed before?

Phei pressed another key. Then another. Not a melody yet—just notes, testing the instrument, testing the silence, testing whether his battered hands could still coax beauty from something after everything they'd endured tonight.

The piano answered flawlessly.

Melissa's doing.

Another quiet act of… what? Love? Penance? Some complicated alchemy only she understood?

He didn't know.

But the keys were there.

Waiting.

And for the first time in a long weeks without touching it, Phei let his fingers find a real melody—something soft, minor, aching. Music his mother had hummed over the stove when he was small, before the world had taken her and left him to the wolves.

The notes filled the penthouse.

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