Next to Harold sat an old man. Sixties, maybe. Hard to pin down with Legacy men — they aged like that expensive leather armchair nobody sits in because it's "for show": slow, superficially distinguished, hiding whatever dry rot and structural weakness lurked beneath the polished surface.
Phei recognized the face instantly from the hallway portraits — those stern-faced Maxton patriarchs stretching back like a disapproving conga line through time. Harold's father. Cassiopeia's father.
The previous patriarch.
The man whose eyes held the sharp, unyielding gaze of someone who'd spent a lifetime being obeyed and saw no earthly reason to break that habit now.
And beside the grandfather… ah~Here we were.
The woman next to the old man was, according to brutal arithmetic, in her sixties. But math, as we all know, is a filthy liar when confronted with Legacy genetics.
