Cassiopeia's voice drifted through the empty penthouse like smoke laced with honey—sweet, deliberate, impossible to dismiss.
"Are you really that afraid of little old me that you had to bundle the entire family into a limousine and send them away?"
She remained at the floor-to-ceiling window. Still framed against the glittering sprawl of the city. But now she had turned—one hip cocked against the cool glass, arms crossed beneath the impossible weight of her breasts, midnight silk clinging and sliding in ways that made the fabric appear liquid, alive, drinking the neon and starlight.
"I only wanted to belong," she murmured. A theatrical little pout shaped her lips—the kind rehearsed in three-way mirrors until it became surgical. "Instead you treat me like I'm contagious."
Phei let out a low, warm chuckle. The sound of someone utterly untroubled.
He glanced sideways at Maya.
Winked.
