The cabin door hissed open like a predator exhaling, and the hot, salt-thick air of Hell’s Paradise Island flooded the jet — humid, expensive, faintly perfumed by sun-baked tarmac, distant ocean brine, and the low growl of waiting motorcades.

Phei stepped down the stairs first.

Then he stopped.

Then everyone else who came down behind him stopped too, because what awaited them on the private apron was, in a single devastating word, ridiculous.

Not the cars themselves — the cars were precisely what one would expect from a convoy assembled for Legacy heirs and their ever-expanding entourage. Black. Polished to a mirror sheen.

Paint jobs that alone cost more than most families’ lifetimes. Phantoms. Cullinans. Two armored Percedes Sprinters. A pair of long, low Pentleys arranged at the front like elegant punctuation marks. Standard fare for people who measured status in six-figure vehicles.

The number of them, however—

There were nineteen.

Nineteen black beasts arranged in a perfect single-file convoy along the apron, engines already purring with restrained menace, drivers standing in identical rigid postures beside identical doors.

The line stretched so far into the night that the final vehicle blurred into the runway lights like the tail of some absurd mechanical dragon.

Sweet merciful fuck, Phei thought, fighting the grin that threatened to crack his face in half. I asked for transportation. Emily heard ’small invasion force’ and decided to cosplay as the second coming of Genghis Khan’s motor pool.

Sierra was the first to recover the power of speech.

"Phei. How did you—"

He offered a modest shrug, the very picture of false humility.

"I simply placed the order."

He tilted his head slightly toward the small, terrifyingly efficient figure descending the stairs three steps behind him, tablet already glowing in her hands like a war-room relic.

"Emily made it real."

Twelve heads swiveled in eerie unison.

Emily Hartwell — freshly seventeen, clad in a navy blazer tailored with surgical precision for this exact moment — looked up from her screen, caught the collective stare, and turned a shade somewhere between rose and boiled lobster in the space of a single, mortified inhale.

"It wasn’t just me, Boss—" She caught herself mid-sentence, course-correcting with the speed of someone who had already mentally drafted her own resignation letter.

"—Phei. Sorry. It wasn’t just me. The Simps handled most of the legwork. Catrina procured the vehicles. Lydia coordinated with airport authority. I merely signed the contracts."

"You signed nineteen contracts," Phei said gently, voice warm with amusement, "in a foreign jurisdiction whose corporate bureaucracy you had never personally encountered, in under thirty-six hours, while simultaneously supervising a full wardrobe coordination meeting. Take the credit, Em."

Emily turned an even deeper, more catastrophic shade of lobster.

Cherry — who until this very moment had assumed "the Simps" was merely an embarrassing nickname Landon had uttered twice and immediately regretted — was now staring at Emily with the dawning, slightly horrified realization of someone who had accidentally walked into the wrong sorority house during rush week.

"Wait." Cherry turned to Landon, voice hushed. "She runs something? Like... an actual something?"

Landon leaned in carefully, knowing he was about to be quoted verbatim. "She runs the something that runs the somethings."

Cherry’s mouth opened slowly, then closed again, as if her brain had filed a formal complaint.

Maddie clapped both hands onto Emily’s shoulders from behind with theatrical affection. "Em, I love you. I would die for you. If anyone ever tries to fire you again I will personally attend the meeting and ruin their bloodline."

Sierra inclined her head — the closest she ever came to overt public warmth. "Well done, Hartwell."

Elena, naturally, had to be Elena about it. "Mm. The little assistant has capable hands indeed."

A muffled snort drifted from a nearby Phantom — Brian, already halfway inside the car with a flight attendant tucked possessively under one arm, her uniform partially loosened in ways that defied both gravity and airline policy. He offered no further contribution to the conversation.

He was otherwise occupied.

Compliments continued to roll through the group like a warm, slightly dangerous tide.

Except—

"Sienna."

Phei tilted his head toward his quietest cousin, who stood at the end of the line with one hip cocked and one perfectly sculpted eyebrow raised at her phone screen as if it had personally offended her.

"Not even a small compliment for Em.?"

Sienna did not look up.

"You dragged me here," she murmured, still scrolling. "It is only right they take care of me on the way. Why would I thank anyone for my own basic rights?"

Phei opened his mouth.

Sierra caught his elbow on one side. Elena caught the other.

"Don’t," Sierra warned.

"Ice robot cannot be helped," Elena added with clinical detachment.

Phei closed his mouth. Smiled instead.

Eira quietly tucked the moment as the cousin who possesses fragments of an ancient goddess and apparently reviews customer service on the same algorithm as a disappointed Michelin inspector.

Brian’s Phantom door closed with a soft thunk. The car gently rocked on its suspension once. Nobody asked questions. Nobody dared.

Boarding was swift, mercilessly efficient.

Phei claimed the last car in the convoy with Melissa lounging to one side and Emily on the other — Melissa because she sat exactly where she pleased, and Emily because the schedule was about to begin and Emily was the schedule.

The Phantom pulled away from the apron in a slow, gliding sweep, and the entire nineteen-car convoy rolled out behind it like a long black ribbon of pure, unapologetic excess being dragged across the night.

Emily was already speaking before they had cleared the airport perimeter, words tumbling out in a perfectly organized avalanche.

"So. Tomorrow morning begins softly — breakfast at the hotel, one hour of scheduled hold time for jet-lag adjustment, followed by the first round of fittings for the Ashford Madam’s principal shoot. That is a full afternoon. Catrina has the lookbook prepared. But we can skip that and do it a night.

"The shoot itself occurs the day after on the secured cliffside location. Immediately afterward you are scheduled with Zata Fashion Group for their Spring/Summer mood pieces — they have been pushing for three months for an exclusive; the Melissa negotiated them down to one campaign. The day after Zata is Petsi. They want you in their adjacent ad cycle for the new flavor launch after the initial arrangements, again with Brian and Landon — soft, fun, very high reach.

"We can decline if you wish, but I strongly recommend accepting because the contract contains an escalation clause we can leverage for the next renegotiation. After Petsi is—"

"Emily."

"Yes?"

"Breathe."

She breathed.

Gods help me, Phei thought, leaning back into the cool leather as the absurd convoy carved its way through the island dark, I’m creating a monster. A terrifyingly competent, slightly pink monster who now runs my life with the same ruthless efficiency she once used to organize my sock drawer.