My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 413: Revealed 18-Years Old Truths 2

Victoria stood three steps up, bleeding from both hands, glass still embedded in her knuckles. She shivered and backed away — fear of him and from the void, from the cold, from the crackling energy that made the air taste like ozone and old blood.

Her eyes were huge but dry.

Victoria didn’t cry when she was scared. She cried when she was furious, and right now the fury hadn’t finished forming yet.

It was still in the kiln. Still hardening.

Phei didn’t care.

Not tonight.

He reached his woman and pulled Melissa into his arms — one hand sliding around her waist, finding the curve of her hip through the thin nightdress, the other gently drawing Delilah against his chest.

Both women were trembling.

Melissa’s trembling was controlled — the vibration of a taut wire, a woman holding herself together by force of will alone, her face buried in his shoulder, her breath hot against his neck.

Delilah’s trembling was not controlled.

Delilah shook the way leaves shake in a storm — helplessly, completely, her fingers clutching his shirt, her swollen face pressed against his chest, the split lip Harold had given her leaving a faint smear of blood.

Bloodstains. Two women. Two sides of the same shirt.

He held them both.

“Eira,”

he said quietly, voice still carrying the echo of galaxies dying, “take all the girls’ belongings. Everything.”

Eira bowed — wings flaring wide, crystalline body pulsing with glacial light — and vanished in a swirl of black frost, already moving through the house at speeds the human eye couldn’t track, already stripping rooms of clothes and books and the small, private things that made a bedroom belong to someone.

Phei looked at Sienna and Victoria.

Two girls on the stairs. One bleeding. One blank. Both felt orphaned by a truth that had just made their father a stranger now and their brother a lie.

“Choose,” he said. “Come with me… or stay with that.”

He didn’t gesture toward Harold. Didn’t need to. That encompassed everything — the man, the house, the name, the legacy, the three hundred years of Maxton history that was currently bleeding into the marble and pissing itself in a crater.

Melissa’s voice cracked through her tears — fierce and final, a mother’s voice, the voice that trumped every other voice in every room it entered.

“Phei, I am not leaving my daughters with that monster.”

Sienna and Victoria were too stunned to speak.

The revelation was still detonating inside them — slower than the punches, deeper than the void, damage that wouldn’t fully manifest for days, weeks, months.

Harold had murdered an infant. His own daughter. The true twin… their fourth sister. Had replaced her with a bastard son and raised the lie as family.

Every Christmas dinner, every birthday, every time Danton had sat at the table and Victoria had ruffled his hair and Sienna had tolerated his presence with her usual cool precision — all of it built on a dead baby girl’s silence.

Then the void answered after Melissa’s words.

A perfect circle of absolute blackness opened beneath Sienna and Victoria with the slow, inevitable certainty of a door that had always been there and was only now choosing to open. The edges glowed glacial white.

The interior was not dark — it was empty. The difference between dark and empty was the difference between a room with the lights off and a room that had never been built.

They didn’t even have time to scream.

Both girls dropped into the rift and vanished — swallowed by the nothing, the white edges closing over them like lips over a breath.

Gone.

Danton stared at the spot where his sisters had been standing. His mouth worked silently. The piss beneath him was cooling on the black-ice floor.

Nobody looked at him.

Nobody had ever really looked at him, and now he knew why.

Maria stood on the stairs, clutching the banister with both hands, tears streaming, phone still warm. She watched Phei hold Melissa and Delilah.

Watched the void-portal begin to form in front of them — larger than the one that had taken the girls, the edges wider, crackling with frozen lightning and starlight, the interior showing nothing and everything simultaneously.

That the text she’d sent had summoned a force that had outgrown her ability to stand near it.

That the family she’d served for fourteen years was walking into a portal made of nothing and she was staying in a house made of ruins.

She didn’t call out.

She didn’t ask to come.

She just watched, and the tears kept falling, and the phone in her pocket went cold.

Phei tightened his arms around Melissa and Delilah’s waists.

The second portal tore open in front of them — a swirling gateway of pure absence ringed in glacial white, the edges alive with arcs of frozen lightning and shards of starlight that crackled and spat, the interior a darkness so complete it wasn’t dark at all but something else, something that existed before light was invented and would exist long after the last star burned out.

He stepped through without hesitation.

Melissa went with him — eyes closed, face pressed to his chest, the nightdress spotted with Victoria’s blood and Delilah’s tears, bare feet leaving the Maxton marble for the last time.

Delilah went with him — trembling, split lip bleeding against his collar, fingers knotted in his shirt, stepping into the void the way you step off a cliff when the person holding your hand is the only ground you trust.

The portal snapped shut behind them.

The sound it made was the opposite of a sound — a vacuum, an inhalation, reality sealing itself over the wound they’d torn through it. The glacial white faded. The frozen lightning died.

The last motes of starlight dissolved into the dark.

The Maxton Mansion stood silent.

Half-ruined. Swallowed in void-darkness that was already beginning to recede — pulling back from the gardens, retreating from the walls, releasing the trees and the stone and the Florentine fountain from its grip.

The stars above the estate flickered back into existence one by one, tentative, like children peeking out from behind their hands to check if the monster was gone.

Harold hung unconscious in the wall of what used to be the second drawing room, embedded in stone and plaster, blood drying in the cold air. The defiance was still on his face. Even gravity couldn’t erase it.

Danton sat in his own piss on the floor of the main hall, staring at nothing.

Maria sat on the stairs.

The house breathed around them — creaking, settling, the sounds a building makes when it’s been shaken to its bones and is trying to remember how to be still.

Three people in a ruin. A patriarch who’d lost his empire. A boy who’d lost his name. A maid who’d lost the family she’d served for fourteen years.

And somewhere beyond the veil of reality — beyond the void, beyond the nothing, beyond the place where light and dark stopped pretending to be different things — Phei carried his women into the abyss he now ruled.

The night was over.

Everything else was just beginning.