My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 390: The Only One 2

The private terrace behind the VIP section existed for exactly this reason: even in places built for relentless hedonism, sometimes the only thing left to do is fall apart in private.

Low leather daybed curved like an invitation. Muted amber lighting that didn’t try to compete with the city sprawl below. Bass from the club inside reduced to a distant, muffled heartbeat pulsing through smoked glass walls.

Downtown Paradise glittered far beneath them—jewellery spilled across black velvet, indifferent to the small human wreckage happening twenty floors up.

Sierra, Maddie, and Delilah sat on the curved bench ten feet away.

Three girls. Three different kinds of silence.

They leaned forward in identical postures—chins in fists, elbows on knees, eyes locked on the scene with the helpless, gut-punched focus of women watching someone they loved be held together by hands that weren’t theirs.

The sadness couldn’t be masked.

Sierra’s jaw worked in tight, rhythmic clenches—the girl who could dismantle entire social hierarchies with a single arched brow, who broke reputations like morning toast—was reduced to watching another woman succeed where she had failed.

Not jealousy, exactly. Something uglier. Inadequacy. The bitter, unfamiliar poison of knowing she’d held him, whispered to him, pulled him close with every weapon in her arsenal—and it still hadn’t been enough.

He was hers. She was his.

And when the darkness came for him, she couldn’t reach across the void.

Maddie’s eyes shone wet under the terrace lights. She wasn’t crying—Maddie Whitmore did not cry where anyone could see it; it violated some internal constitution she’d never explained—but the gloss was unmistakable.

She’d felt his heart slamming against her ribs earlier tonight when she’d bear-hugged him, and she’d known, with the bone-deep certainty of a girl who’d memorised every rhythm of his body, that the racing wasn’t anger.

It was pain. Ancient, marrow-level pain. The kind no amount of kissing, fucking, or chaos-demon energy could outrun or outfuck or outlove.

Delilah

sat between them, hands folded neatly in her lap. Quietest of the three.

She wasn’t frustrated. Wasn’t burning with the sting of failure. She was glad—quietly, fiercely glad—that someone had reached him.

Glad the black had retreated from his eyes before it swallowed everything.

Glad someone could still pull him back from the edge. If that relief set her apart from Sierra and Maddie—if it made her less possessive, less territorial, less properly part of the harem—then fine.

She could live with being the odd one out.

She’d watched her own sister nearly get frozen tonight.

She understood the rage better than either of them ever could.

And she was simply grateful he’d been stopped before he turned Victoria into something that couldn’t be unfrozen.

Maya Scarlett lay stretched along the daybed.

On her side. One arm bent beneath her head, elbow on the low leather armrest, palm cupping her own cheek. Silver hair spilled across the cushion in a lazy, luminous river, catching stray terrace light like moonlight given physical form.

Her body followed the curve of the furniture effortlessly—long legs extended, one ankle crossed over the other, the clean lines of her silhouette softened by shadow and glow.

Just calm, watchful stillness—the quiet authority of someone who moved through shadows and knew some moments demanded presence, not theatrics.

Phei’s head rested in her lap.

He lay on his back against the leather, face turned into the cradle of her thighs, eyes closed. His hair—frozen moonlight made strands—fanned across her legs, silver filaments catching dim light in fragile glints.

His breathing had slowed. Deepened. The jagged, barely-leashed rhythm from moments ago had finally smoothed into something approaching peace.

Maya’s free hand moved through his hair.

Slow. Deliberate. Fingers combing from temple to nape in long, unhurried strokes—gentle, repetitive, the way you’d soothe something feral that had finally chosen to stop fighting the touch.

Not petting. Tending. Fingertips tracing his scalp with a patience that didn’t come from practice; it came from instinct.

From the quiet, wordless knowing that had always let her read the storm fronts in his emotions the way old sailors read clouds before they broke.

She hummed.

Low. Almost inaudible. Not a song—just warm, formless vibration born in her throat and carried through the press of her thighs into the skull resting there.

The sound that existed before words, before lullabies, before anything except the primal need to say: you’re safe. I’m here. Nothing gets past me while I’m holding you.

She could feel him descending.

The locked tension in his jaw was loosening, muscle by muscle. The faint crystalline frost that still dusted his cheekbones and temples—visible only if you knew where to look—was melting under her body heat, turning to faint, glistening moisture.

His head shifted—barely a fraction—sinking deeper into her lap, into the soft give of her thighs, like a man who’d been fighting undertow finally allowing the shore to take his weight.

Her fingers found the tender spot behind his ear where the hair grew finest and lingered.

She didn’t understand it. Not fully. Not yet.

This morning—Christ, had it really only been this morning?—he’d been locked behind ice. The Ice Prince in full armour. Sierra had tried. Maddie had tried. Melissa had tried.

The whole orbiting constellation of women who loved him had thrown warmth, worry, devotion at the glacier—and bounced off.

Then Maya had walked in.

Made one stupid joke about his hair looking like he’d been electrocuted by moonlight.

And the Ice Prince had cracked. A real smile—crooked, bewildered, boyish—had broken through.

The seventeen-year-old underneath the power had surfaced: the one who devoured novels too fast, still occasionally forgot to tie his shoes even though he could levitate now.

She’d pulled him back to himself this morning.

And now she’d done it again.

One hand on his cheek. Two words: calm down.

And the void had obeyed like it recognised only one voice in the universe with authority over it.

From ten feet away she could see Sierra’s shoulders rigid with frustration, Maddie’s eyes glassy with unshed tears. They were his. They shared his bed, his body, his wars, his future. They gave him everything and he gave them everything too.

But when the ancient thing inside him rose up to devour him, they couldn’t reach through.

Maya could.

She wouldn’t pretend the realisation didn’t bring a small, selfish bloom of happiness—private, locked away in the same hidden compartment where she kept every feeling for Phei that refused to fit into neat boxes.

She was his exception. The one who could cut through the static. The hand that dragged him back from the dark when no one else could touch bottom.

But the happiness carried its own shadow.

What happened if she wasn’t there?

If she’d been thirty feet away instead of seven tonight. If she’d arrived five minutes later. If the distance had been a car ride instead of a sprint across the dance floor—would Sierra and Maddie have been enough? Would anyone?

Or would Victoria Maxton be a statue of black ice right now, Phei’s secret exploding across every screen in Paradise, and everything they’d bled to build reduced to ash and headlines?

What the hell had happened to him?

The question kept circling like carrion overhead. The powers. The void-black eyes. The frost that could drop a room’s temperature in heartbeats. The Void-Ice. None of it had existed days ago.

He’d been powerful before… godly if you may—but this was older. Hungrier.

Something ancient and cold wearing his skin like borrowed clothes, and it was growing stronger every time it surfaced.

She didn’t know how to fight what she couldn’t name, couldn’t see, couldn’t predict.

She needed to be closer.

Not emotionally—she’d crossed that line weeks ago and never looked back. Physically. In the same space.

Close enough that if the dark came at 3 a.m. on a random Tuesday, she wouldn’t need traffic and keys and prayer to reach him.

Her fingers never stopped moving through his hair. Steady. Rhythmic. The humming continued—that low, wordless lullaby that seemed to be the only frequency his exhausted mind could still receive.

He shifted against her thighs. Settled deeper. Breathing fully even now—slow, calm, the respiration of someone who’d finally found the one safe harbour in a world of knives and frost and was refusing to let go.

Maya looked down at him.

At the white strands fanned across her legs like spilled moonlight. At the face that could make goddesses kneel and had nearly turned a nightclub into a mausoleum twenty minutes earlier. At the boy buried beneath it all—the one who read too much, ate too fast, had been broken by too many people until his own blood answered violence with violence.

“Phei.”

Soft. Just above breath.

His eyes stayed closed. But the subtle hitch in his breathing told her he heard. Not asleep. Just resting in the safe dark behind his lids, trusting her to stand watch.

“Mmm~”

“Would you like it if I moved in with you?”