Time spent with Linda was never enough.
Never would be.
Some nights the fantasy hit like a drug: torch the schedule, burn the calendar down to ash, and just... disappear into her. Days bleeding into nights of lazy cuddles that made the sunrise feel optional.
Making love
until "enough" became a punchline nobody remembered.
Letting empires collapse, enemies queue up for their turn at vengeance, the whole planet spin off its axis into convenient oblivionâwhile I stayed buried in her warmth, pretending I was still just the scrawny kid who once hid behind her legs when the landlord knocked too loud.
But heroes keep office hours.
Monsters keep scorecards.
Paris was waiting like a diamond-studded guillotine, all sparkle and inevitability.
Iâd arrive there as Eros
âghost in the machine, untouchableâwhile the world tuned in to watch
Peter Carter
play dramatic ICU chess with death under a very polite CIA security blanket.
The cover story was Oscar-worthy:
Dmitri, that wheezing sack of expired ambition, had green-lit the hit to erase Charlotte and her mother. Peterânoble, idiotic hero, camera-ready Peterâhad dove in front like a human shield, pushed them out of the way. Took the bullet meant for billionaire heiresses worth more than small countries...
Quite the heroic selflessness.
Cue orchestral swell. The internet lost its collective mind.
#PeterTheHero
dominated feeds for two straight days. Candlelight vigils blocked hospital sidewalks. Students mailed
get-well
cards with glitter and tear stains, people whoâd never heard my name before suddenly claiming theyâd "always believed in him."
Live segments featured sobbing commentators asking
"What does true courage even look like anymore?"
while I lay there doped to the gills, quietly amused that my cardiac monitor had become a
national mood
ring.
Then Dmitri died.
Not with dignity. Not with a last cigarette and a philosophical sigh. My drones delivered a bespoke
neurotoxin
symphony
âsomething so elegantly cruel it deserved its own museum
plaque.
Leaked
IHIN
photos showed skin peeling away in polite translucent sheets, eyes ballooning like overinflated party favors about to pop, face frozen in a scream that looked less like pain and more like someone had finally explained irony to him in graphic detail.
Even the grizzled crime-desk veterans had to step outside for fresh air and a quiet existential crisis.
The internet immediately diagnosed
divine justice
. Poetic payback. The universe hitting
Ctrl+Alt+Delete
on a bad actor.
Funny how the universe keeps getting credit for my best work.
It doesnât even have thumbs.
This was the longest continuous stretch in
Eros Mode
since the whole circus started. Peter only came out to play when family was aroundâwhen the god static dialed down and I could fake being the broke neighborhood kid whoâd somehow
main-charactered
his way into divinity. Lindaâs youngest.
Emma and Sarahâs personal chaos agent. The one who used to pilfer Momâs off-brand cereal and blame the cat.
After Soo-Jinâs surgical demolition of Jasmine at the rangeâseven perfect rounds to zero, followed by the worldâs most polite offer of "lessons"âthe mansion had turned into beautiful, unhinged
pandemonium.
My Korean blade had smiledâactually smiledâwhile offering pointers.
Jasmine had stormed upstairs, door slam registering on the Richter scale, and declared me exiled for
arming that soulless machine to publicly execute Olympic dignity.
Iâd knocked and offered sincere apologies through the oak. Sheâd suggested I
deep-throat a chandelier.
Iâd countered with promises of a bespoke range: climate control, ambient lighting, champagne on tap, maybe a personal barista. Sheâd
upgraded
the chandelier threat to
include broken glass appetizer.
Mom and I had laughed until breathing hurt.
"Sheâs like a kitten trying to roar,"
Mom wheezed, wiping tears.
"More like a kitten that just discovered it has opposable thumbs and a grudge,"
Iâd said. We both knew sheâd forgive us by breakfast.
Probably.
Assuming she didnât poison the coffee first.
Later Madison and I had rolled up to Tommyâs.
Tragic news:
Ms. Chen had ghosted her own house. Sheâd clearly sniffed out that her son and his girlfriend were both present and decided the "liberation session" weâd teased yesterday would have to stay on ice.
Smart. A little heartbreaking.
Tommy and Mia were home on a weekdayâpractically a holiday sighting.
Ms. Chen had fled to her
restaurant-manager
shift at dawn. Same steel-spine refusal to quit her job, same of that
stubbornness
that my mother had.
Kidâs sitting on generational wealth and sheâs still clocking in to yell at line cooks about cleats treatment. Respect.
The liberation agreement could wait. Patience is a virtue Iâm still workshopping.
Fixing Tommy and Mia was almost insultingly simple once I unleashed the systemâs relationship-expert knowledge. Madison ran soft interrogation. I brought the emotional sledgehammer.
Thirty minutes later they were making out like
horny oxygen thieves
whoâd just invented
kissing.
Gross. Find a closet, you degenerates...
Miaâs grudge list had been
Tolstoy-length;
the shooting was just the convenient spark. Tommy disappearing every night she stayed over to haunt Lincoln Club like a sad ghost chasing old dreams we once had.
Dumping cash
on every argumentâ
gifts, extra cards, shiny bandaids
âbecause actual
conversation scared
him more than a drive-by. Seventeen years old now.
Zero mileage. Panic dialed to eleven.
The club thing cut deeper than Iâd braced for. He wasnât chasing glory. He was
lonely.
Mia was perfect, but she wasnât the guy who used to split the last Hot Pocket at 4 a.m. while trash-talking bad respawns.
He missed me.
The
friendship-shaped
hole hurt worse than any breakup.
My bad.
I laid it all bare. Told Mia she wasnât spotless eitherâ
saints are boring and nobody likes them anyway.
Told Tommy I couldnât be his 24/7
co-op
partner anymore: women, empires, responsibilities that laughed at 3 a.m. Slurpee runs. He nodded. Understood.
Thatâs what best friends do when the game updates and your save file gets archived.
Before I peeled out, I palmed him the Permanent stamina pills and Dick Enlargement pills too. Sleight-of-hand smooth. The kind engineered to keep a man operational until the sun comes up and girls politely asks for a timeout.
One of Miaâs quieter gripes wasnât Tommyâs personality. It was performance. He could manage a respectable night. But she spent daylight hours with Madison and the rest of my harem. She heard the war stories when Sofia, Emma told Ashley and Reeves stories of what I could do: hours, multiple days acts, zero cooldown. Expectations had been... aggressively upgraded.
So why not arm the brother for the long war?
Same way those transformation pills had turned my soft, fat, awkward ride-or-die into a rich-boy thirst hot boy trap, these would rewrite the bedroom meta. Mia would get limitless black cards
and
the kind of endurance that turns Netflix-and-chill into Netflix-and-marathon. Tommy would get domestic peace. And, eventually, very smug texts at 2 a.m.
Of course to make it air tight, Madison told Mia that Tommy had been facing his won stress that is why he wasnât fully operation, this way when
Tommy goes full beast
on her she wouldnât realize what was happening and only think that Tommy waws just back to his real
performance.
Sorry for the lie, but for my brother I could lie to Pope too. Jesus too... only that guys can see through my lies.
He owed me.
Massively.
Some days I caught myself wondering if godhood was mostly just being the worldâs most overqualified,
performance-enhanced Cupid.
ARIA reported that
T.AGI
was ready.
Weâd decided to create a separate
AGI
specifically for tradingâsomething divorced from ARIAâs main consciousness so she could focus on the thousand other things that required her attention. The project had stalled at ninety-five percent, but immediately after the Trillion Dollar mission, Iâd given her the go-ahead to finish.
T.AGI
was different from ARIA. Where my primary goddess was sophisticated, strategic, concerned with long-term implications and elegant solutionsâT.AGI was designed to be an
I DONâT GIVE A FUCK
trading machine.
Ruthless. Aggressive.
She was a kind of entity that would crash markets without blinking if the profit margins justified it.
Yes, her.
Apparently, all my AIs had female personalities. I didnât design it that way consciously, but here we were.
Okay I did!
With
T.AGI
complete, we could finally touch Keylaâs crypto business properly. Binary options firstâwipe them clean with $700 billion while
T.AGI
ran test drives in crypto and stocks. I knew she was good.
Iâd built her to be good.
But that was for later.
Right now, I was heading to
Montecito.
To the ghost mansion. The birthday gift that shouldnât exist. The property ARIA couldnât find no matter how many databases she cracked.
The Reaper sliced through traffic like it had a personal vendetta against the concept of congestion.
Madison rode point with the casual arrogance of someone whoâd been born wearing throttle glovesâbody fused to the machine, every lean surgical, every burst of acceleration a quiet declaration of dominance.
I rode
pillion,
arms locked around her waist, engine heat bleeding through her leathers into my chest like shared adrenaline.