Chapter 805: The Road to Ghosts 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 oblivion—while 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. I’d arrive there as Eros—ghost in the machine, untouchable—while 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. Peter—noble, idiotic hero, camera-ready Peter—had 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 who’d never heard my name before suddenly claiming they’d "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—something 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. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂 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 doesn’t 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 around—when the god static dialed down and I could fake being the broke neighborhood kid who’d somehow main-charactered his way into divinity. Linda’s youngest. Emma and Sarah’s personal chaos agent. The one who used to pilfer Mom’s off-brand cereal and blame the cat. After Soo-Jin’s surgical demolition of Jasmine at the range—seven perfect rounds to zero, followed by the world’s most polite offer of "lessons"—the mansion had turned into beautiful, unhinged pandemonium. My Korean blade had smiled—actually smiled—while 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. I’d knocked and offered sincere apologies through the oak. She’d suggested I deep-throat a chandelier. I’d countered with promises of a bespoke range: climate control, ambient lighting, champagne on tap, maybe a personal barista. She’d upgraded the chandelier threat to include broken glass appetizer. Mom and I had laughed until breathing hurt. "She’s like a kitten trying to roar," Mom wheezed, wiping tears. "More like a kitten that just discovered it has opposable thumbs and a grudge," I’d said. We both knew she’d forgive us by breakfast. Probably. Assuming she didn’t poison the coffee first. Later Madison and I had rolled up to Tommy’s. Tragic news: Ms. Chen had ghosted her own house. She’d clearly sniffed out that her son and his girlfriend were both present and decided the "liberation session" we’d teased yesterday would have to stay on ice. Smart. A little heartbreaking. Tommy and Mia were home on a weekday—practically 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. Kid’s sitting on generational wealth and she’s still clocking in to yell at line cooks about cleats treatment. Respect. The liberation agreement could wait. Patience is a virtue I’m still workshopping. Fixing Tommy and Mia was almost insultingly simple once I unleashed the system’s relationship-expert knowledge. Madison ran soft interrogation. I brought the emotional sledgehammer. Thirty minutes later they were making out like horny oxygen thieves who’d just invented kissing. Gross. Find a closet, you degenerates... Mia’s 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 argument—gifts, extra cards, shiny bandaids—because 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 I’d braced for. He wasn’t chasing glory. He was lonely. Mia was perfect, but she wasn’t 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 wasn’t spotless either—saints are boring and nobody likes them anyway. Told Tommy I couldn’t be his 24/7 co-op partner anymore: women, empires, responsibilities that laughed at 3 a.m. Slurpee runs. He nodded. Understood. That’s 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 Mia’s quieter gripes wasn’t Tommy’s 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 wasn’t fully operation, this way when Tommy goes full beast on her she wouldn’t 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 world’s most overqualified, performance-enhanced Cupid. ARIA reported that T.AGI was ready. We’d decided to create a separate AGI specifically for trading—something divorced from ARIA’s 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, I’d 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 solutions—T.AGI was designed to be an I DON’T 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 didn’t design it that way consciously, but here we were. Okay I did! With T.AGI complete, we could finally touch Keyla’s crypto business properly. Binary options first—wipe them clean with $700 billion while T.AGI ran test drives in crypto and stocks. I knew she was good. I’d 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 shouldn’t exist. The property ARIA couldn’t 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 who’d been born wearing throttle gloves—body 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.