Chapter Text
The celebratory dinner was an obligation Peach couldn’t—and wouldn’t—refuse.
Arseni was hosting the spring collection’s wrap party. Small, intimate, just the team. Plub, Aran, P’Nuch… everyone would be there. As much as Peach longed for his bed, he needed to at least make an appearance.
The restaurant was exactly the kind of glittering, understatedly high-end place Arseni would choose. Peach approached the private room to a wall of noise—boisterous laughter and the clink of glasses.
“P’Peach! You came!”
Peach couldn’t help but smile.
There was Aran, his beautiful, annoying nong, drunk as a skunk on an empty stomach and half-sprawled across a similarly inebriated Plub. They looked like matching, disheveled dolls: sparkling eyes, pink-flushed cheeks, and identical, too-wide grins.
Shaking his head, Peach flagged a server for two large waters. He moved to the sofa, gently jostling the pair into something resembling a seated position.
“Ai’Ran. Ai’Plub. Are you kidding me?” he scolded, his voice fond despite the sharp words. “How many times have I told you two not to get completely sloshed? Look at you!”
As he fussed, a familiar, unsettling prickle crept up his spine. The instinct of a quiet man in a loud room. The sense of being watched.
He glanced over his shoulder.
His gaze swept the room—the happy team, the busy staff—and found nothing. Just the dim, elegant expanse of the main dining area, nearly empty at this late hour. A lone figure sat at a shadowed corner table, backlit by the city’s glow, too far away to distinguish.
Peach dismissed it. Paranoia, born of exhaustion.
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While the clamor of celebration unfolded across the room, it was observed from a place of perfect silence.
Theerakit Kian Lee—CEO of Arseni, heir to the Lee family empire—did not flinch when Peach’s eyes swept over him. He remained still behind the veil of shadow and distance.
He sat with a glass of single malt and the silent, mountainous presence of his bodyguard, Mok. The party was a buzzing hive he owned. His attention, until tonight, had been fixed on one prize: Aran.
Peach’s arrival changed the frequency of the room. The model’s dramatic giggles softened into something more genuine, his clingy possessiveness shifting to trust. This intrigued Thee.
He knew the photographer, of course. Peachayarat Jane-Kit. A quiet professional on his payroll. Competent. Unassuming.
What he hadn't calculated was the gravity Peach held. Aran orbited him like a dependent planet.
Thee was a man who acquired what he wanted. Tonight, he had wanted the delicate, famous model. The path had been cleared: Aran’s lover, Tawan, had been made an offer for his family’s company that resembled mercy but felt like humiliation.
He’d taken it, of course. People always did.
Everything was ready. Aran was drunk to the perfect point of pliant suggestibility.
Then came Peach. Sober. Grounded. A calm, disruptive force.
Thee’s initial impulse was cold irritation. A variable.
But as he watched—the gentle hands, the patient sighs, the unshakable calm in the storm of drunkenness—a new, more compelling interest sparked.
Bringing Peach along was initially tactical. Aran’s beloved Phi would be a pacifying agent, a human sedative. But as Thee studied the photographer—the clean lines of his profile, the quiet intensity of his care, the sheer, unmarketable authenticity of him—the plan began to morph.
Aran was a beautiful obsession, a glittering object of desire.
But Peach… Peach was a puzzle. And Theerakit Kian Lee had never encountered a puzzle he didn’t take apart, just to learn the mechanism.
He could envision it: Peach, flustered. Peach, cornered. Peach, his serene composure finally fractured. The thought held a different flavor than his hunger for Aran. It was sharper. More interesting.
A slow, contemplative smile touched Thee’s lips as he took a final sip of his whisky. The night’s objective was no longer singular.
He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
Behind him, Mok’s phone lit up with a silent message to the driver waiting in the underground garage, and to the other shadows stationed at the exits.
Prepare the car. Two guests.
A slow, dark smile touched Thee’s lips as he watched Peach struggle to guide the giggling Aran toward the doors. The photographer’s gentle scolding was swallowed by the restaurant’s din.
Thee did not rise. He did not need to.
The command was sent.
The night was no longer theirs.