Four days.
It's been four days since the sky above Main Paradise tore open like wet silk and every Legacy estate slammed their gates, swallowed their keys, and pretended the rest of the world had simply ceased to exist.
Four days of perfect, suffocating silence.
Four days of the most powerful bloodlines cowering behind marble and steel like children hiding from thunder, waiting for the monster to get bored and leave.
But for four days the Goddess had been drowning.
The Ashford dining table was obscene—twenty-four seats of hand-carved mahogany polished to a black mirror, old enough to have overheard treaties that birthed empires and whispers that buried them.
Above it hung a Venetian crystal chandelier worth more than most people's bloodlines, scattering warm gold across the five figures clustered at one end like shipwreck survivors clinging to the same piece of driftwood.
Five.
In a room built for twenty-four.
