My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 440: No Anchor: War with Self

The car was a sealed vault of silence—matte black, windows like smoked obsidian, driven by a man whose entire profession could be reduced to two words: discreet transport.

He understood that the highest price a client could pay for was not speed, not luxury, but the absence of sound.

No radio. No small talk.

Just the low, velvet growl of the engine and the city bleeding past in molten streaks of gold, violet, and electric blue.

Phei occupied the rear seat like a statue carved from shadow and restraint. Hands flat on his thighs. Eyes fixed on a point three inches beyond the headrest in front of him. No phone. No restless tapping. No ritual of checking notifications to remind himself the world still turned.

Just stillness so complete it felt like violence held in check.

Victoria’s voice had not left the vehicle.

The actual sentences were already fraying at the edges—specific phrases melting the way frost disappears into the warmth it was born from—but the weight remained.

Heavy. Uninvited.

Occupying the empty leather seat beside him like a second passenger who refused to be ignored.

I’m not asking to be the One, Phei.

Just make me one of the girls.

He had no choice but to admit it, even if only inside the locked vault of his own skull; tonight he could not deny what Victoria had done.

Because the world misread her. They saw the blade-edge smile, the tongue that could flay reputation in three syllables, the gaze cold enough to stop breath mid-inhale—and assumed that was the whole architecture.

Perhaps the cruelty was native. Perhaps Harold had threaded it into her DNA so deeply it required no conscious thought, the way lungs do not ask permission to breathe.

But the other Victoria? The one who stood barefoot in her half-sister’s oversized hoodie and leggings that didn’t belong to her, mascara running like oil slicks, saying I’m sorry with the desperate sincerity of someone who had never once practiced the sentence?

That version was catastrophically unequipped.

She was genuinely, appallingly, heartbreakingly bad at vulnerability. And whatever fractured confession had spilled out of her in that penthouse tonight—the halting apology, the trembling list of sins, the way the word family had splintered in her throat—she had meant it fivefold inside of her.

Tenfold?

The spoken words were only the visible tenth of the iceberg inside of her. Beneath lay something oceanic, something so vast and unnameable that Victoria herself had never been given the grammar to describe it.

She had mastered dissection. No one had ever taught her sutures.

And yet she had tried anyway—piecing apologies together from scavenged scraps, snot, shame, and the tattered remnants of a girl who had spent nineteen years being the sharpest object in every room only to discover that sharpness and strength are not synonyms.

It was real. God help him—it was devastatingly real.

Eira hovered at shoulder height, a small hovering galaxy of frost and refracted light. Wings moving once every few heartbeats, just enough to defy gravity.

Streetlamps shattered across her crystalline body in soft, dying prisms.

She watched him without blinking. She could see the memory loop playing behind his eyes: Victoria’s tear-streaked face, the way her shoulders had folded inward like broken wings. Eira could read the micro-fracture in his composure—something had slipped past the defenses.

Through a hairline crack he hadn’t known existed. Victoria’s words had either found it, stumbled into it, or simply pressed against the wall long enough that the wall wearied of resisting.

But Eira also saw that touched and changed were not synonyms. Phei’s inner landscape no longer permitted easy movement.

“Are you reconsidering your position regarding Victoria?” Her voice was deliberate crystal—never hesitant, always precisely chosen.

Phei gave no answer.

The city continued its liquid slide past the windows. Brief strokes of amber and crimson washed across the leather interior like dying firelight.

Eira adjusted her phrasing. “I know forgiveness is already being considered. So allow me to reframe.” She drifted closer; the cold radiating from her kissed his cheek like winter’s warning. “Are you going to take her as yours?”

A breath left him—long, slow, shuddering—like something had been clenched inside his ribs since the elevator doors had closed on Victoria’s face.

“She left a mark tonight,” he said, barely above a whisper. Two fingers pressed to the center of his chest. “In here.”

Eira remained silent.

“But that is precisely why it’s the problem.”

He let the quiet stretch until it ached.

“The harder I try to forgive and let it go—the rage, the decade of bruises, the locked room that always smelled of urine and terror they made me go through Eira—” His voice splintered. “—the deeper the hooks sink deeper and trap me.”

He stared through his own ghost in the glass: gray suit, white shirt, a young man dressed like he ruled empires, confessing to his winter sprite that he could no longer locate the exit from his own mind.

“The more I attempt to walk forward and let the past go, the more it surrounds me. Not behind me anymore—around me. A room without doors. I stand in the exact center, and every direction is the same darkness.”

Eira’s wings froze mid-beat. The faint, eternal crystalline chime that followed her everywhere simply… stopped.

“And after the awakening…” He closed his eyes. “My emotions are untethered. My feelings are just… loose, Eira. All of them. Anger, happiness, whatever’s in between — none of it’s attached to anything. Rage drifts. Joy drifts. Anything between them drifts. I possess power most would kill gods to taste, yet I paid for it by amputating whatever part of me that once knew how to feel correctly—how intensely, how long, where to direct it, where to bury it.”

He opened his eyes and met hers.

“Every time I try to take a step from my past — even a small one, just to create something else— something snaps. Like a wire. A filament. A circuit. And the next heartbeat I’m either back insidethat black room or I want to reduce the entire world to ash just to feel quiet again.”

The car cornered smoothly. Fresh neon. Fresh shadows. Same prisoner.

“Tonight she stood there and poured her heart onto the floor. I heard every syllable. And a real part of me—a substantial part—wanted nothing more than to…” His voice snagged. Not broke—caught like fabric tearing on iron. He cleared his throat.

“…to hold her. Tell her the lie we all crave in that moment: It’s over now. You’re safe. I forgive you. Just — just do the thing a normal person does when someone they’re supposed to care about is falling apart in front of them.”

He stared at his open hands as though expecting to see blood.

“But I couldn’t. Because the second I reached for that — for the gentle thing — the other thing reached back. That thing the awakening installed where patience used to sit. Ice. Precision. Absence. And I could no longer distinguish which impulse was truly mine. The one that wanted to cradle her… or the one that wanted to snap her neck just to stop the sound of her crying.”

His jaw pulsed—locked, released, locked again. Muscle flickering beneath skin like faulty wiring.

“That terrifies me.” The words came out raw. “More than the One Above. More than Harold. More than any enemy that still breathes and bleeds. Because those I can strike. Those I can kill. But this—” He struck his own sternum once—hard. The dull impact rang louder than it should have in the sealed car.

But when the enemy is just — it’s me, Eira. It’s me fighting me… this is me at war with me. And I cannot tell which half is winning.”

A silence followed so dense it felt like drowning.

Then, quietly:

“So no,” he said, after a silence that was too long and too heavy for the backseat of a car. “I’m not forgiving her. I’m not making her mine. Not because I don’t want to. Because I don’t trust what’s in here—” he tapped his chest, harder this time, the knuckle landing with a dull thud that sounded louder than it should have “—to do it right.”

He leaned his head back against the supple leather, eyes drifting upward to the smooth black ceiling of the car as though answers might be written there in invisible ink.

“Right now I can only rely on time,” he said. The words came out soft, almost resigned. “Maybe along the way my mind finds something. An anchor. Something heavy enough to tie myself to so I stop… drifting.”

He kept staring at the ceiling. The city lights flickered across it in faint, passing ghosts.

“But tonight’s not that night.”

The car passed under a low bridge. For two full seconds the world went black—complete, swallowing shadow. When the neon bled back in, something in Phei’s face had shifted. Not transformed. Deeper. Like a lake you thought you could wade across until your foot found the drop and kept falling.

“And sometimes…” He stopped. Tried again, quieter. “Sometimes it feels like my past isn’t even behind me. It’s chasing me. Actively. Like it knows I’m trying to get away and it’s decided that’s—that’s not allowed.”

His voice was doing something strange now. Not rising with anger. Not cracking with theatrical grief. Thinning. Growing quieter the way a beam groans under too much weight—not louder, but softer, the silence before the break.

“There are moments. Real ones. Not dramatic—just… in the shower. Before sleep. Right now.” He turned his head toward the window. His reflection stared back: perfect jaw, glacial eyes, the face that made strangers lose their breath. Always the outside. Always the mask. “Where I think maybe I should stop running. Just turn around. Let it catch me. Let it do whatever it’s going to do. Because the running is—”

His breath hitched. Small. Almost invisible. If you weren’t Eira—ten thousand years of listening etched into frost and starlight—you would have missed it.

“—the running is killing me anyway. Just slower.”