Chapter 392: The Custodian’s Shattered Pieces

A/N: Pay attention and tap into when you seethis; 1

Melissa Maxton stood in the corridor behind the VIP section, spine flat to the wall, both fists buriedknuckle-deepin her own hair like she could physically yank the thoughts out.

Theplanwas fuckingdead.

Whatever slow, surgical strategy she'd spentweeksstitching together—millimetre by millimetre trust, the emotional equivalent of defusing a Claymore one wire at a time—that plan was now a corpse, and her eldest daughter had gutted in under five minutes by acropped hoodie, a hand placed on the wrong chest, and Victoria's signature cocktail ofarroganceandcatastrophic timing.

She couldn't proceed tonight. Couldn't proceed this week. Maybe not this month. Maybe never, if the frost kept spreading.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, beautiful, impossible girl.

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 aboutbloodlines, familytrees, or the inconvenient fact that the girl in its path was the daughter of the womanit 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.

Hermannow, 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 washers. It wasruinous.

It was thetruestthing she'd ever chosen.

And her daughter. Her firstborn. The infant she'd held nineteen years ago in atoo-brighthospital 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 wouldnevernumber"good mother"among them.

Victoria's cruelty hadn't sprouted in sterile soil.

They'd had... a falling out.

What abloodlessphrase 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 theothercold—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 thegirlshe'd raised.

Every fragile, idiotic hope she'd nursed—that he might find mercy, that timemight 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-reasonhope that Phei would find it inhimself to forgive—had evaporated.

Hehadforgiven someone. He'd looked atDelilah—thesame 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 underpermafrost, guarded by teeth and void, but real.

She'd dared to hope the same mercy might one daystretchfar enough to cover herother daughters.

She'd beenrealistic enoughto know it wouldn't happenquickly. 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'tapathybut a different kind of scream.

But Victoria—impatient, reckless, carrying the Maxton stubbornness like a loaded gun—had to walk in dressed for conquest instead of atonement. Had to place her palm on a chest that housed a dragon and sayI'm not leavingto the one boy on earth who had already passed sentence.

Melissa wanted to scream until the ceiling came down.

Melissa didn't scream.

Instead, she pressed her nails into her palms until the half-moons turned bone-white and thought about the things that actually mattered; Her daughters.

Danton is irrelevant. 1

She acknowledged it with the same flat, exhausted honesty of a woman who'd spent years performing Maternal Devotion: The Musical and was finally too fucking tired for an encore.

Whatever had happened between Phei and Danton—the beatings, the public humiliations, the slow systematic dismantling of a boy who'd spent years tormenting Phei—she wouldn't blink if Phei came to correct that debt.

Couldn't scrape together the energy to care. It was cold of her. She knew that. Sat with the knowledge like a stone in her mouth and swallowed it anyway.

ButPhei. Victoria. Sienna. Delilah.

Those four were hers... her world really. Herheartwalking around on four separate pairs of legs.

Hersouldistributed across fragile, flammable bodies. The only blood that counted.

The people she woulddie for, kill for, ruin herselffor in increasingly creative ways—and tonight she'd stood fifteen feet away, champagne flute trembling in her hand, terror clawing up her throat, watching two of them nearly annihilate each other.

She'd run.

When the frost had raced across marble like spilled quicksilver, when Phei's eyes had emptied of every human colour and filled with the black between dead stars, when Victoria had planted her feet because her stubbornness was a congenital defect that turned every carrier into their own worst enemy—Melissa had run.

Straight toward them. Between them.

The"plan"—if you could dignify the frantic maternal arithmetic of a woman simultaneously watching herloverand herdaughtercollide with the label"plan"—had been brutally simple: insert body between dragon and daughter.

If he was going to turnVictoriaintoan ice sculpturefor the VIP section's permanent collection, he would haveto freeze Melissa first.

Turn his first woman, his claimed woman, hismineinto a frozen monument before he could reach the girl who'd pushed too far.

Maybe—maybe—the sight of Melissa's face in the kill zone would pierce the void. Maybe the boy buried under scales and frost would recognise the woman who'd held him through nightmares and feel something human enough to stop.

Spare Victoria. Byspending herself.