My Taboo Harem!

A few minutes earlier.

The guard pushed open the door to the control room with a heavy metallic groan that echoed down the empty corridor like a dying man’s last breath. Banks of monitors lined the walls in a relentless grid—dozens of cold, unblinking screens devouring every corner of the academy: shadowed hallways, rain-slicked courtyards, twisting stairwells, and storm-lashed rooftops.

The blue glow painted the cramped space in a sterile, clinical frost, humming with the low, incessant static of constant, merciless surveillance.

The air tasted of ozone and old coffee but…

Someone was already inside.

The realization hit him a fraction of a second too late.

A hooded figure was hunched over the main console like a predator crouched above fresh kill, fingers dancing across the keyboard with lethal, practiced grace. Dark clothing melted seamlessly into the shadows.

Hood pulled low to cover his face with the back turned to the door in deliberate, arrogant indifference — as if the guard who had just entered were nothing more than an annoying insect that had just wandered into the wrong room.

The figure didn’t flinch. Didn’t even glance back.

The guard’s hand shot to his radio. His mouth opened to snarl a challenge—

The room died.

Every screen. Every monitor. Every merciless light.

Blackness swallowed the space whole in one ravenous, absolute gulp. Darkness so complete it felt alive—hungry, suffocating, pressing against the eyes and lungs.

Nothing remained but the guard’s ragged, terrified breathing and the thunderous hammer of his own heart trying to explode out of his chest.

Then the screens flickered back to life.

One by one. Row by row. A slow, mocking resurrection.

FOOTAGE DELETED

FOOTAGE DELETED

FOOTAGE DELETED

Stark white text burned across every black screen like a death warrant carved into reality itself.

The figure turned slowly with the same arrogance.

A black mask consumed the lower half of his face, revealing nothing human. Above it, its eyes glinted in the cold blue light—sharp, amused, starving—two shards of pure predatory hunger. The temperature in the room seemed to plummet.

The air grew heavier, charged with the promise of imminent slaughter.

The guard reached for his baton, fingers clumsy with sudden dread.

The assassin moved.

One heartbeat he was across the room. The next he was there, at the door—a blur of shadow and impossible velocity that spat in the face of physics, biology, and every natural law the guard had ever believed in.

The assassin moved.

A blur of pure shadow and death exploded across the room, impossible, inhuman, slamming into the guard before his next thought could even form. Steel flashed the white sharp of the blade in an instant only his eyes registered and it was already wet — tore across his throat in a single vicious line.

There was no pain!

Only the sickening wet heat spreading across his neck while his hand was still clawing for the baton, his mouth still trying to scream a warning that would never come, his mind still refusing to understand that he was already dead.

Then the agony detonated.

He looked down. A thin red line — almost delicate — traced across his throat. Then the line split open like a screaming mouth.

Blood exploded outward in a hot, pressurized geyser, painting the doorframe, the walls, and the floor in thick arterial crimson. His carotid had been ripped wide open.

Each frantic heartbeat jetted fresh life across the tiles in violent, obscene sprays, turning the man into a thrashing, blood-soaked carcass still standing on borrowed seconds.

His knees buckled and he collapsed—hands clawing desperately at the ruin of his neck, fingers slick and useless, trying to hold back the flood, trying to keep his existence from pouring out between them.

But there was too much blood. Too much damage. The spray weakened with every fading pulse, slowing, sputtering, dying.

Thud.

His body hit the floor. Knees first and then the rest of him crumpled sideways into the warm, spreading lake of his own blood. He twitched once an twice.

On the third he went still.

The masked assassin stood motionless in the doorway for a long, terrible moment, watching the crimson tide creep toward his boots with quiet satisfaction.

Then he turned—one final, indifferent glance at his masterpiece—and vanished around the corner and into shadow.

Into nothing.

As though he had never existed at all.

****

The news slithered into the courtyard like poison on the wind, carried on the shoulders of two pale, shaken officers. They emerged from the security wing moving with unnatural care, bearing the dead guard between them.

The man who had been sent to retrieve the footage and should have returned twenty minutes ago.

His throat was no longer a throat but just a savage ruin of torn flesh and dark, congealing blood.

The cleaner’s eyes flew wide with raw, animal horror.

Clean up. The words slammed into his skull like a sledgehammer. This is a cleanup. The girl had been pushed from that rooftop. Someone had deleted the footage. And now the only witness who might have identified the killer on those screens is being carried past me with his neck carved open like a pig at slaughter.

Loose ends.

Yes! They were tying off loose ends.

And if these people were willing to murder a guard in cold blood inside his own control room to protect their secrets, then what about him? The cleaner who had witnessed the dark figure fleeing the rooftop.

The cleaner who had screamed about murder. The cleaner who had demanded this be treated as a crime scene, the same person who had seen too much, said too much, and was now standing exposed in the open with a bright red target painted across his back.

He started looking around him in vigilante terror.

His head swiveled left, right, behind him—frantic, desperate—searching the shadows, searching the faces, searching for the death he could feel breathing down his neck. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

His legs felt like water. Every shadow twisted into the shape of a hooded figure. Every glint of light became the flash of a wet blade.

That was when his gaze locked onto the boy.

The student who had arrived earlier asking questions now stood at the edge of the courtyard, hands buried casually in his pockets, watching the unfolding chaos with the mild, detached interest of someone enjoying a mildly entertaining street performance.

He was grinning.

While everyone else stared at the dead guard—officers with pale faces and trembling hands, the forensics team frozen mid-motion, the other cleaners clutching each other like frightened children in the dark—the boy grinned.

A small, satisfied curl of the lips… a predator watching its prey stumble blindly into the trap. His expression said this night was unfolding exactly according to plan.

Like the only thing that had ever worried him was the guard now lying dead with his throat opened wide.

Like the only evidence that could have tied him to the girl’s broken body on the concrete had just been erased forever.

The cleaner’s blood turned to ice in his veins.

He knows, some ancient survival instinct screamed inside him. He knows what happened to that girl. He knows because he did it. He’s the one that raped her. He killed her. And now he is calmly eliminating every single person who might have seen.

The boy turned.

And walked away.

Not running or bothering to hurrying.

Just walking—slow, unhurried, regal leisurely stride of someone who had all the time in the world because the world belonged to him.

Because his last name was Heavenchild, and that name meant he could do anything to anyone and suffer no consequences. Because girls like the one bleeding out on the concrete were nothing—less than nothing—mere toys to be used, broken, discarded, and forgotten.

The Chief of Police himself broke away from his officers and jogged—actually jogged—to catch up with the boy. Like an obedient servant rushing to attend his master.

Like a dog answering its owner’s whistle. The cleaner watched them speak.

Watched the Chief bow his head slightly, deferentially, as the boy talked, the easy, familiar body language between them—the comfortable posture like they had done this before and covered up far worse things than this, and who would cover up far worse things still.

The Chief began to turn as the boy finshed whatver he’d said, eyes sweeping the courtyard with the cold, systematic gaze of a man cataloging every remaining witness.

The boy gripped his shoulder.

Quick. Deliberate. A silent command disguised as a casual touch.

The Chief stopped.

And did not turn.

In that single frozen moment, the cleaner understood—with perfect, horrible, soul-crushing clarity—exactly how small he truly was. How powerless.

How utterly insignificant in a world where boys like Marcus Heavenchild could rape, murder, and stroll away smiling while police chiefs sprinted to serve them.

This was Paradise.

And in Paradise, the powerful devoured the weak without mercy, no one ever spoke of it, and the bodies piled up in places where they would never be found.

If the cleaner had been any wiser, any more vigilant, perhaps the next few hours would have ended differently.

Perhaps he would not have died screaming in the back of that police car on the way to give his statement at the station.

If he had been wiser, he would have realized that Marcus Heavenchild and the Chief of Police had been talking about him—the last remaining witness standing in the way of this case being quietly ruled a suicide.

Before every piece of evidence—the footage, the medical records, the forensics reports, the witness statements—was erased from existence.

Before the world swallowed yet another powerless man whole.

And moved on without so much as a ripple.

And no one ever talked about those two men who died that night.