My Taboo Harem!

Then he started walking.

Not toward the broken body still leaking blood onto the concrete or towards the flashing lights or the swarm of officers and forensics teams setting up their sterile white lamps around the horror.

He walked straight toward the main building.

Toward the Dean’s office.

He had only made it halfway when Dravenna Ashford came sprinting from the opposite direction.

The cleaner had worked at Ashford Elite Academy for eleven years. He had seen the Dean in every conceivable form in her few years as the Dean — furious enough to make walls tremble, commanding enough to silence entire rooms with a single glance, coldly amused in ways that made powerful men sweat blood, icily professional enough to make seasoned lawyers weep.

He had watched her dismantle Legacy messengers with nothing but a raised eyebrow. He had seen her carve through crises like a warship slicing through storm waves — untouched and untouchable.

He had never seen her like this.

She was still in her nightclothes — a silk robe thrown hastily over whatever she slept in when she stayed over at the academy, feet completely bare against the damp grass, dark hair loose and wild around her shoulders like a living storm.

Her face was bone-white. Her eyes were huge, dark, and terrified.

And she was running — truly running — with none of her usual predatory grace.

The Chief of Police intercepted her like a wall.

He led her sharply aside with an eye sign, away from the crowd, away from the officers, away from any ears that might overhear.

They spoke.

The cleaner couldn’t catch the words over the sirens and crackling radios and growing murmurs, but the body language screamed everything.

The Chief’s resolve and determination was hard as iron. His head bent close to hers. Words poured out in a low, relentless stream.

Dravenna’s face collapsed in real time — horror bleeding into disbelief, then into something far worse.

The complete, devastating crumbling of her entire world.

And then Dravenna Ashford — the Dragoness, the woman who made Paradise’s most powerful men tremble once, the Dean who ruled this academy like a living mountain — broke.

Her knees gave out completely.

She sank onto the grass like a puppet whose strings had been viciously slashed, silk robe pooling around her, bare feet folding beneath her, hands clawing desperately at the earth as if she needed to prove it was still solid beneath her.

For the first time in eleven years, the cleaner watched the Dean of Ashford Elite Academy cry.

Not delicate tears of the Paradise’s Elite’s elegant weeping.

Sobbing.

Great, heaving, guttural sobs that convulsed her entire frame, that tore from her throat in raw, broken sounds so visceral they cracked something deep inside the cleaner’s chest. The kind of crying that could not be performed… they endlessly erupted when grief became so vast it devoured the soul whole.

The air felt itself change.

A sudden, crushing pressure drop. Crackling static. The hairs on the cleaner’s arms stood rigid. His teeth ached. The temperature plummeted ten degrees in a single heartbeat.

The Chief leaned in closer.

He whispered something else.

Dravenna went deathly still — the absolute frozen stillness of prey that realizes the predator’s jaws have already closed around its throat.

Her head lifted slowly while tear-streaked face turned toward the Chief with an expression that turned the cleaner’s blood to ice.

Whatever the man had just said, it was not comfort.

It was a threat.

Her wild gaze swept across the entire courtyard — guards, cleaners, officers, paramedics, forensics, the growing crowd of staff and students. For one frozen second, her eyes locked directly onto the cleaner.

I see you, those eyes screamed silently. I see you seeing me. And I am terrified of what you’ve witnessed is might end you.

Then she stood.

Stumbling backward at first, graceless and shattered, nothing like the predator she had always been. Then she turned and ran — bare feet slapping desperately against grass then concrete as she fled the courtyard, fled the body, fled every eye that had just watched the Dragoness shatter.

Her phone was already pressed to her ear.

“Do they think they can get away with this? DO THEY?!”

Dravenna’s voice shattered the night — sobbing and screaming tangled together into one raw, wounded, and utterly dangerous sound.

“I’ll make them pay! ALL OF THEM! Every single one of those—”

Her voice fractured and faded as she disappeared around the corner of the main building, but the echoes of her fury lingered in the cold air like the afterimage of lightning, sharp and electric.

The cleaner stood very still.

The Chief had threatened her. He was certain of it now — certain in the deep, instinctive way he knew fire burned and water drowned.

He had seen her face.

He knew what terror looked like when it wore the skin of a powerful woman.

What he had witnessed in Dravenna Ashford’s eyes wasn’t just grief.

It was the terror that came from knowing exactly who had done this… and knowing you could not touch them.

A boy appeared at the edge of the courtyard.

Young. Still in his uniform. Probably dragged from late studying by the sirens and the screaming. He stood frozen for a long moment, staring at the controlled chaos — the girl’s body still lying in its dark pool of blood, forensics photographing every gruesome detail, officers taking statements, the crowd of witnesses swelling larger by the minute.

The cleaner saw the exact moment the easy lie settled into the boy’s eyes.

A girl had just committed suicide.

That was the conclusion they would push. The clean, comfortable one that required no dangerous questions and would be printed in tomorrow’s headlines and whispered in tomorrow’s hallways and accepted as truth by everyone who hadn’t stood here and watched a figure melt into shadow on the rooftop above.

The cleaner knew better.

Two guards suddenly jogged toward the officers reporting about their fellow guard — the youngest guard who had been sent to check the cameras. He still hadn’t returned.

The officers exchanged tense glances. Drew their weapons. Moved forward with the cautious precision like they were expecting to find something terrible.

The cleaner filed it away in the only part of his mind still functioning. The guard had gone for the footage but the guard had never come back.

The footage would be corrupted. Or missing. Or show nothing at all.

Because that was how things worked in Paradise.

Evidence vanished. Witnesses forgot. Investigations stalled. And the powerful always protected their own.

Forensics continued working the scene under harsh white lights. The body would not be moved for hours — chain of custody, proper procedure, the full bureaucratic theater that followed violent death.

But eventually the coroner’s van would arrive, the girl would be zipped into a black bag, the blood would be hosed off the concrete, and in a few days this courtyard would look exactly as it had before.

As though nothing had happened.

As though a girl hadn’t fallen screaming from ten stories while someone watched from the shadows and simply walked away.

The cleaner caught a fragment of hushed conversation as two forensics techs passed nearby.

“—tearing on the clothing. Bruising pattern on the inner thighs consistent with—”

“—keep your voice down. We don’t know who’s—”

“—sexual assault. Clear as day. Someone did this to her before she went off that roof—”

“—I said keep it down. Christ. You want to end up like—”

They moved out of earshot.

The cleaner’s hands started shaking again.

Sexual assault. Bruising. Torn clothing.

Someone had raped her. And then someone had thrown her off a building to silence her. Or she had jumped to escape what they were doing to her. Or—

It didn’t matter.

Murder. Rape. Cover-up.

A figure dissolving into shadow. A police chief threatening the Dean. A guard who went for the cameras and never returned.

The cleaner stood motionless in the middle of the courtyard, mop long forgotten, uniform soaked with a dead girl’s blood, and felt the shape of something vast and monstrous pressing against the edges of his soul.

This is no suicide.

This is murder.

And something cold and certain in the pit of his stomach told him the killer was never going to be found.

Because the killer wasn’t hiding.

The killer was being protected.