Phei, the dragon of elegant ruin, gestured with the languid precision of a maestro conducting his own requiem.
Cassiopeia's dark eyes flickered — a solitary scintilla of infernal comprehension igniting in their obsidian depths — and she crossed the living room to him in four slow, unhurried steps. The silk robe, that treacherous whisper, rustled against the bare tops of her thighs like the wings of a dying moth, each movement a deliberate flirtation with indecency.
Phei admired it briefly as an engineering feat of such sublime absurdity that it rivalled their own entanglement: 'a fragile tower of deceit balanced on the knife-edge of desire, defying gravity, propriety, and good sense with equal contempt.'
