Chapter 392: The Custodian’s Shattered Pieces
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The situation had taught her things, though.
Several new and terrible truths, each one lodging somewhere between her ribs like broken glass she would breathe around for the rest of her life.
She had watched Phei nearly erase Victoria from the world.
She’d watched actual frost spiderweb across marble. Watched every scrap of human colour leach from eyes she had kissed a thousand times while he slept until only void remained—cold, starless, impartial.
Watched the air itself thicken into something edged and obedient, something that did not give a single fuck about bloodlines, family trees, or the inconvenient fact that the girl in its path was the daughter of the woman it loved.
Her man. Her nephew. The son of her brother—the brother she’d lost, the brother whose ghost lived in Phei’s jawline and his stubborn mouth and the way his eyes went hard when he was hurt.
Her man now, in the only definition that still mattered—beyond blood, beyond taboo, beyond any word society kept clean and folded away.
She had crossed that line with both eyes open and would cross it again tomorrow, because what lived between them wasn’t maternal, wasn’t safely familial, wasn’t anything the world had invented polite language for.
It was hers. It was ruinous.
It was the truest
thing she’d ever chosen.
And her daughter. Her firstborn. The infant she’d held nineteen years ago in a too-bright hospital room and sworn the entire fucking universe to—a vow she’d broken in a thousand petty, exhausted, human ways ever since because Melissa Maxton was many things; history would never number “good mother”among them.
Victoria’s cruelty hadn’t sprouted in sterile soil.
They’d had… a falling out.
What a bloodless phrase for watching death in slow motion walk toward your child while wearing the face of the man you loved.
She pressed her forehead to the cold plaster and thought about the other cold—the one that had rolled through the VIP section like the hush before an execution. The cold that came from Phei. The cold that had been aimed, without hesitation, at the girl she’d raised.
Every fragile, idiotic hope she’d nursed—that he might find mercy, that time might soften the scartissue, that patience and careful choreography could make him see Victoria and Sienna as people instead of weapons—had burned away in seconds.
Every hope she’d carried—every stupid, reckless, against-all-reason hope that Phei would find it in himself to forgive—had evaporated.
He had forgiven someone. He’d looked at Delilah—the same Delilah who’d helped run the machine that broke him—and found something redeemable. Had kissed her with a gentleness so pure it carved Melissa’s lungs out from the inside, because it proved the capacity still existed.
Buried under permafrost, guarded by teeth and void, but real.
She’d dared to hope the same mercy might one day stretch far enough to cover her other daughters.
She’d been realistic enough to know it wouldn’t happen quickly. She’d built the plan accordingly: months, not weeks. Controlled exposures. Letting him see them as flawed, hurting girls instead of tormentors. Letting him discover what she already knew—that Victoria’s venom had roots in places even Melissa hadn’t fully mapped, that Sienna’s silence wasn’t apathy but a different kind of scream.
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