Phei smiled faintly.
There it was.
Recognition.
Not of his name or of the absurd inheritance sitting behind him like a sleeping dragon made of money, violence, and family trauma.
Just recognition of the simple observable fact that the man standing before her with a wine glass and amethyst eyes did not, by any available metric, resemble a person who needed to stalk women for attention.
Maybe she did not know him specifically, which made sense. Despite his increasingly ridiculous existence, the entire world was not obsessively tracking his face yet:
But between the appearance, the clothes, the posture, and the effortless young-master gravity wrapped around him like generational wealth made physical, there was absolutely no honest reading of this situation in which he resembled a desperate rooftop predator surviving on celebrity delusions and parasocial illness.
