The shower kept running, hot water pounding his shoulders like it could wash away the weight of the notification. It couldn't. Nothing could.
But the steam helped.
Made the air thick enough that the words floating in front of him felt a little less sharp.
Phei braced both hands on the charcoal tile, head bowed, letting the spray beat down the back of his neck. The system had just handed him a soul brand — an active, irreversible enslavement tool — and the only thing that surprised him was how little surprise he felt.
He wasn't horrified.
He wasn't even conflicted.
He was… ready.
Because the math was simple now.
Consort wasn't just a threat. She was a guillotine waiting to drop. One order from the One Above and Patricia Bloom — the woman currently curled in navy sheets with her bare pussy still leaking him from last night — would be dead.
All of them.
Wiped out in whatever elegant, surgical way the old blood liked to erase problems.
