Chapter 500: The Story of Selene

He didn't start at the beginning.

He started with her.

"Remember when youaskedme if there was anyone?"he said, eyes still on the road, both hands steady on the wheel even though something in his voice had already begun to fray at the edges. "And I told you there was, but I didn't explain."

Maya nodded quietly.

She remembered.

"Her name was Selene."He said it simply, but the name did something to the air between them, something heavy and tender and old, like a door opening in a house no one had entered for years.

A door he refused to enter.

Maya didn't ask what kind of name that was, or what kind of girl Selene had been, because she already knew enough to understand what mattered.

She had always known things about him in that strange, effortless way only she seemed capable of, thefairy, and all the other impossible things woven through his life like threads no one else could see.

She had known there had been a girl. She had known the girl was gone... everyone at school did.

She had known whatever remained of her inside him had never really healed.

She just hadn't known the story.

"I was so much in love with her,"Phei said.

No smile or any attempt to make it lighter or careful little trick of language to push it further into the past and make it easier to hold.

Just the truth, bare and unguarded. Was. Maybe is. Some feelings never cared much for grammar.

"She was from Downtown Paradise as you probably know. Her parents were residents, not Legacy, not Main, but they had money. Real money. Enough for a good house, a comfortable life, good schools, the kind of money that makes people think theworld will at least be fairto them if they stay in the right neighborhoods and know the right names."

"It wasn't, Maya."

He fell quiet when they reached a red light.

Sunset poured through the windshield in long orange bands, turning the inside of the car into something almost unreal, too warm and beautiful for the words that came next.

"Marcus Heavenchildrapedher."

He said it cleanly, and that somehow made it worse.

There was no shaking in his voice, no sharp burst of fury, no stumble, as if he had carried the sentence for so many years that it had been worn smooth by repetition, like a stone kept in a closed fist until it learned the shape of the hand around it.

"And after that, she killed herself."

Silence filled the car at once, thick and absolute.

Outside, Paradise kept moving.

Light changed. Buildings slipped by.

Somewhere far away, the city went on breathing, but inside that car it felt like the whole world had stopped just long enough to listen.

"According to the report, it wassuicide,"he said after a while, his voice lower now, quieter, as if he were speaking from somewhere much farther away. "And maybe it was. That part didn't need to be faked. He broke something in her that couldn't be put back together, and she's maybe decided she couldn't to carry what was left."

Maya's fingers tightened around his hand.

Not enough to interrupt.

Just enough to say she was there.

"Do you know what hurts the most, Love? I had evidence, Maya"he went on. "Files. Footage. More than rumors, more than whispers, more than the kind of thing people hear and choose not to repeat. I had enough to prove what he did. And herfather..."He exhaled slowly, eyes fixed ahead. "After Selene died, hewent to war."

There was something painfully quiet in the way he said that, not admiration exactly, but something close to mourning for a kind of belief the world had beaten out of him long ago.

"He was the kind of man who still believed truth mattered. Justice. Accountability. All those words people love when they're still convinced the world can be forced to kneel to them. He thought if he had enough money, enough evidence, enough good lawyers and the right investigators, then somebody would finally make Marcus answer for what he did to his daughter even though no onebelievedhim."

The light turned green.

Phei drove on.

"He hiredfive private investigators. Five."A humorless breath slipped out of him, almost a laugh, except there was nothing amused in it. "He threw everything he had at it, and for a little while it actually felt possible. Like maybe this time would be different. I had thought then. That; maybe someonewith money and connections and enoughragecould pry open the Heavenchild name and find something underneath it that could bleed."

His jaw tightened.

"Two of them died."

Maya didn't say anything.

She only held on.

"The otherthree disappearedafter they gotpaid. Took the money and ran, which honestly made them thesmartest menin the whole story."

His mouth curved for half a second, but it was the kind of expression that hurt more than if he'd looked angry. "One of the two who died had met with me. I gavehimcopiesof everything. Every file. Every piece of footage. Everything I had. I handed it over because I thought..." He broke off.

For one moment, just one, he looked younger.

Not in his face, not really, but in the shape of the silence that followed, in that brief and terrible glimpse of the boy he had been when he still thought some doors only needed enough force to open.

"I thought if someone real was handling it," he said at last, "if therewas an actual case being built by people with resources and experience and names that meant something, then maybe, just maybe, for once, someone could touch the Heavenchilds. I thought Marcus could be dragged into the light. I thought the name Heavenchild might finally fail to protect one of its own."

He gave a short, dry laugh.

It sounded like something breaking quietly in the dark.

"Gods, I was stupid... I feel like I killed that man after I gave him solid evidence."

Even until now he did not know why the Heavenchilds did not dare touch him even whenthey knewhe had something that couldimplicatetheir son.

"The next day, the investigator I had met was found dead in his apartment.

Heart attack, according to the report."

"Natural causes, according to thedoctorswho testified that the man had a long history ofcardiovasculardisease, doctors who had apparently been paid well enough to rememberillnessesthat had never existedand sign papers that smelled of fresh ink, old money, and that particular breed of corruption Paradise barely bothered to hide whenever the Heavenchilds were involved."

Phei swallowed once.

Then kept going.

"And the second one, the one he'd shared his findings with, got caught in'gang crossfire'. Wrong place, wrong time. That's what the police said. Just bad luck. Just another body, another file, another neat little ending for people who were never meant to live long enough to become a problem."

The sky outside had begun to darken now, the gold thinning into violet, the city lights slowly taking over.

"That was when I understood, Maya"he said softly. "Really understood. There wasnofighting them in normal ways. Not properly. Not in court, not through evidence, not with money, not with investigators, not with lawyers. None of it mattered. It didn't matterwhat you knew. It didn't matterwhat you could prove. I'd been a fool to think even for a second that the rules applied to them justbecause I hopedthem to."

He shook his head once, small and tired.

"No one could touch them or any other Legacy."

Maya turned her face toward him and watched him in silence.

The hard line of his jaw.

The way the muscle in his cheek kept moving.

The way he spoke like each word had to be dragged up from somewhere deep and ugly and carefully kept sealed for years.

Then he said,"But it didn't end there."

That was the part that made her chest tighten.

Because everything he had said so far already felt unbearable, and still, somehow, she knew the worst of it had not yet arrived.

"Selene's father kept going,"Phei said. "Even after those deaths. Even after the investigators started dropping or vanishing. He kept pushing. Kept digging. Kept refusing to let his daughter become one more quiet tragedy people nodded at and then stepped around. He was astrong-willedman than I was!"

His voice roughened there, just slightly.

The smallest crack.

"He wouldn't let her deathmean nothing, unlike a coward like me who gave up after the odds proved Mt. Everest."

The word hung in the car like iron.

And after a long moment, with the last of the sunset dying beyond the glass, Phei said the next line so quietly it almost hurt more than the rest.

"And theHeavenchilds noticed."

It happened fast, which was to say it happened exactly the way these things always happened when a Legacy family decided someone had become inconvenient.