After the attack, Phei vanished.

Not with fireworks or a dramatic mic drop—just a quiet, methodical erasure of himself from every stage that mattered.

At Ashford Elite Academy, he became the ghost who never showed. In Sovereign Tower, he moved like a glitch in the matrix: doors closing behind him before cameras could focus, footsteps that left no echo. Even the system—his constant, omnipresent with a cosmic god-complex—got ghosted harder than a bad Tinder date.

He'd started ignoring it the day he realised he was tired of being congratulated for doing push-ups. The daily Dragon Rise pings had felt less like encouragement and more like a needy ex sex-texting "good morning" with nudes, every time he broke a sweat.

So, he'd asked—half-joking, half-desperate—if it could just shut up and drop the Dragon Routine rewards once a week instead.

It had said yes.

Since then: it was a blissful, beautiful silence.

He buried himself.

In the gym until his muscles filed for emancipation. In endless eavesdropping on academy gossip, mapping whispers like minefields and every activity that happened and catalogued by his devices around the academy and paradise. Which was easy with the AI summary and categorizing.

And—most treacherously—in the slow, inevitable slide into something that looked, felt, and occasionally quacked like a genuine relationship.

With Melissa. With Sierra. With Maddie.

It had begun as pure, exquisite revenge porn in the beginning. He'd set out to fuck them into submission, to watch the untouchable Legacy princesses beg, break, and thank him for the privilege. A power trip so delicious it should have come with a warning label.

Then the poison turned into wine.

He'd long ago stopped doing it to prove a point.

He started doing it because the alternative—not having them—felt like walking around with a phantom limb. Because their laughter in the dark did not like capitulation he used to hate and started sounding like the only language he still trusted. Because somewhere between the power plays, the filthy commands, and the way Sierra's breath hitched when he said her name like a threat and a prayer, feelings had staged a coup.

And then there was Maddie.

Letting her in had been almost laughably easy.

Sierra had been the mastermind: blackmail, rumours, orchestrated humiliations sharp enough to draw blood. Maddie had mostly watched from the sidelines, a chaos imp popping corn while Rome burned.

She'd never personally held the torch.

So, if he could take, Sierra, the woman who'd engineered his personal hell—if he could forgive her, claim her, crave her until the word "love" felt too small and too clean for what they did to each other in the dark—then Maddie was barely a parking ticket.

Maybe he had some kind of syndrome?

What was it called again? That thing where the captive falls for the captor? Like a Disney princess swooning over the brooding beast who locked her in a castle. Beauty and the Beast, but with better sex and orgasms, moans and better communication. And not letting revenge ruine the beautiful things he had.

There was a proper name for it.

Stockholm something.

Stockholm Syndrome. Yes.

Only in his case, the roles were scrambled like eggs in a blender.

He'd been the one who started with the chains—

Now it was metaphorical, sexual, emotional. He'd been the one who decided revenge tasted better hot. And now here he was, voluntarily handing over the keys to the dungeon and asking them to lock him in too.

Yeah... Classic Stockholm.

Except he was both the prisoner and the warden, the dragon and his hoard, the once tormented and the tormenter but with sex and orgasms

Funny how that works.

The women who'd once treated him like something stuck to the bottom of their Louboutin now treated him like the air they breathed.

And he let them.

Hell, he encouraged it.

Two weeks had slipped by since the masked amateurs had stuffed him into a van like an inconvenient parcel and beat the shit out of him before he escaped.

Two weeks of being a non-entity. Of dropping so completely off the Legacy families' radar that mentioning his name probably felt like bringing up Voldemort at a Death Eater reunion—technically possible, but why risk the jinx?

Some would call it cowardice. Running. Hiding.

Phei called it intelligence.

Knowing when to retreat is not surrender; it's chess. Right now, the board was tilted, the pieces rigged, and his leverage—formidable as it was—wouldn't stop a second kidnapping or a quiet "accident."

He wasn't strong enough to burn their world down.

Not yet.

So, he waited. He trained. He schemed.

And he reached one ice-cold, crystal-clear conclusion:

He needed to become indispensable!

Right now, if he disappeared for good, the Legacy families would clink glasses and call it a happy coincidence. Charity boy flew too close to the sun, got his wings clipped—tidy, poetic, forgettable.

That story had to die screaming.

While he waited for an opening—any crack, any mistake—he would make himself too valuable, too visible, too beloved to vanish without consequences.

First battlefield: Popularity!

He poured himself into basketball like a man trying to exorcise demons with crossovers.

Every day on the cracked concrete court outside Paradise, running drills with Max, DeShawn, and the Free Spirits crew until his lungs threatened to secede and his legs plotted mutiny. The system's second 20% knowledge upload had finally fused with muscle memory—no longer awkward data clashing with untrained flesh, but pure, liquid instinct.

Two weeks later he'd hit 30% proficiency.

Out there, among people who didn't know his bloodlines or his sex body count, he became myth.

Pretty Boy. The Ringer. The quiet kid who showed up in what looked like knock-oof sneakers and made everyone else look like they'd learned the game from a malfunctioning Roomba.

He trained for war too.

Fighting classes. Grappling. Dirty, practical moves that prioritised survival over style with his gym trainer. Enough that if someone tried the bag-over-the-head trick again, he'd leave them with missing teeth and a new appreciation for dental insurance.

Never helpless again.

And yes—he fucked.

Extensively. Enthusiastically. With the full, shameless cooperation of his women.

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