My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 392: The Custodian’s Shattered Pieces

But Victoria—impatient, reckless, carrying the Maxton stubbornness like a loaded gun—had to walk in dressed for conquest instead of atonement. Had to place her palm on a chest that housed a dragon and say I’m not leaving to the one boy on earth who had already passed sentence.

Melissa wanted to scream until the ceiling came down.

Melissa didn’t scream.

Instead, she pressed her nails into her palms until the half-moons turned bone-white and thought about the things that actually mattered; Her daughters.

Danton is irrelevant.¹

She acknowledged it with the same flat, exhausted honesty of a woman who’d spent years performing Maternal Devotion: The Musical and was finally too fucking tired for an encore.

Whatever had happened between Phei and Danton—the beatings, the public humiliations, the slow systematic dismantling of a boy who’d spent years tormenting Phei—she wouldn’t blink if Phei came to correct that debt.

Couldn’t scrape together the energy to care. It was cold of her. She knew that. Sat with the knowledge like a stone in her mouth and swallowed it anyway.

But Phei. Victoria. Sienna. Delilah.

Those four were hers… her world really. Her heart walking around on four separate pairs of legs.

Her soul distributed across fragile, flammable bodies. The only blood that counted.

The people she would die for, kill for, ruin herself for in increasingly creative ways—and tonight she’d stood fifteen feet away, champagne flute trembling in her hand, terror clawing up her throat, watching two of them nearly annihilate each other.

She’d run.

When the frost had raced across marble like spilled quicksilver, when Phei’s eyes had emptied of every human colour and filled with the black between dead stars, when Victoria had planted her feet because her stubbornness was a congenital defect that turned every carrier into their own worst enemy—Melissa had run.

Straight toward them. Between them.

The “plan”—if you could dignify the frantic maternal arithmetic of a woman simultaneously watching her lover and her daughter collide with the label “plan”—had been brutally simple: insert body between dragon and daughter.

If he was going to turn Victoria into an ice sculpturefor the VIP section’s permanent collection, he would have to freeze Melissa first.

Turn his first woman, his claimed woman, his mine into a frozen monument before he could reach the girl who’d pushed too far.

Maybe—maybe—the sight of Melissa’s face in the kill zone would pierce the void. Maybe the boy buried under scales and frost would recognise the woman who’d held him through nightmares and feel something human enough to stop.

Spare Victoria. By spending herself.