Like every Legacy family that had begun drifting toward Phei's descent from Paradise to Hell's Paradise Island, drawn with the quiet certainty of ruin finding the aftermath of war, Lucienne had begun realizing she was no different from them after all.
The realization came slowly and shamefully.
Because the way she found herself leaning toward Phei was something language itself seemed unequipped to hold.
It was too ugly to be called fascination and far too consuming to be reduced to obsession:
Those words felt insultingly small beside whatever this thing inside her had become or had always been — this dense, warm, suffocating gravity that pulled at her thoughts when she wasn't guarding them and pulled harder when she was, flooding her veins with liquid heat and leaving her cunt aching and dripping in the quiet hours of the night.
It was the kind of pull that made disasters inevitable...
