The balcony air tasted like jasmine and smog—LA’s signature cologne, pollution married to flowers in a relationship that shouldn’t work but somehow did. The mansion sprawled below us, all warm lights and architectural excess, the kind of home that whispered generational wealth even though I’d bought it three months ago with supernatural currency.
Aunt Jasmine leaned against the railing, wine glass dangling from fingers that had stopped shaking about twenty minutes ago.
She’d been processing for the last hours I’ve been away—silent settled between us she was... overwhelmed, occasionally making sounds that were half-laugh, half-disbelief, like her brain was buffering and couldn’t decide which emotion to load first.
"I still can’t believe it," she finally said, voice carrying that edge of someone who’d accepted the impossible but hadn’t made peace with it yet.
"All this money. You bought Linda a mansion." She gestured at the house like it might disappear if she stopped acknowledging it was real. "A fucking mansion in Lincoln Heights’ most expensive neighborhood. Not a house. Not a nice house. A mansion."
I sipped my wine—some vintage that cost more than my old life and tasted like liquid validation. "Mom deserves it." 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎
"She does. She absolutely does." Jasmine turned to look at me, eyes catching the ambient light in ways that made them look more gold than brown. "But that’s not even the part I can’t process, Peter. It’s—" She stopped. Laughed. The kind of laugh that said she’d seen something her brain couldn’t file properly.
"It’s that estate."
I smiled despite myself. "My place?"
"Oh my God, the estate." She said it like a prayer, like blasphemy, like both simultaneously. "Where we all stayed after the shooting. Where I spent hours trying to understand what the fuck was happening to my life." She took a long drink of wine.
"Peter, that place looked both futuristic and ancient from the outside. Like someone built a temple to tomorrow using blueprints from Atlantis. And inside?"
She shook her head, blonde hair catching moonlight and city glow, the strands brushing her bare shoulders with a whisper that felt louder than it should.
"Inside it was out of this world. High-tech doesn’t even cover it. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of a sci-fi movie except everything actually worked. The security systems. The medical bays—yes, the fucking medical bay because apparently you just casually have hospital-grade equipment in your basement. The AI that runs everything."
She paused. "ARIA, right? She sounds like she could launch nuclear missiles if she got bored, by the way."
"She could," I admitted. "But she’d make it entertaining."
Jasmine laughed again—that breathless sound of someone whose reality had been systematically demolished and rebuilt in the last few hours. She set her wine glass on the railing, turned to face me fully, and then—without warning—reached up and held my face between her hands.
Her palms were warm. Soft. The gesture so unexpectedly tender it made my chest tight, the heat of her skin seeping into mine like a slow-burning fuse.
"But Pete... How?" she asked, searching my eyes like the answer was written in my irises if she looked hard enough. "How did you get all those women? Twenty-plus women, Peter. Twenty-plus."
I couldn’t help it.
I chuckled.
She’d seen everything. Of course she had. Madison had probably given her the full tour—the kind of tour you give someone when you want them to understand exactly what they’re dealing with and loop them into it like registering them into a cult but showing them advantages first.
"I didn’t believe you on your birthday," she continued, thumbs brushing my cheekbones in a way that felt more intimate than it should, the pads of her fingers tracing the line of my jaw with a feather-light pressure that sent electricity straight to my spine.
"Insane pictures, by the way. Professional-quality nude photography of you with all of them. Each one of them. In their bedrooms and entire estate but the living room. At least that was kept with normal pictures."
"And that room. The one Madison showed me." Her cheeks flushed slightly, a slow bloom of color that started at her collarbone and crept upward. "Very enthusiastically. Very proudly. Like she was giving me a tour of the Sistine Chapel except instead of religious art, it was—"
The Sex Room had been my bedroom originally—absurdly large, the bed a monument to excess.
The Sex Room was where we held orgies and kinks. It was actually Rebecca’s favorite room than her own bedroom.
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