My Taboo Harem!

Somewhere in Paradise, Phei was balls-deep in his goddess.

Somewhere in Paradise, the Ashford Madam arched beneath him like a living sacrifice on silk sheets, her broken cries swallowed by plush pillows and the sacred privacy of a hotel room that had become their altar of ruin. Pleasure was being worshipped the way it deserved — slow, thorough, merciless — the kind of attention that made powerful women forget their own names, forget their legacies, forget everything except the stretch and the heat and the way he owned every inch of them.

But here, in a cell that reeked of regret, and the sour despair of a man who had finally been caught, Chief Morrison was trying to sleep.

The cot was too thin. The blanket was too rough. The cellmates — three low-level dealers and a drunk driver who had wiped out an entire family of four — snored in a grating symphony of human failure that scraped against Morrison’s nerves like sandpaper on exposed bone.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about irony.

Chief of the Paradise Police Department. Thirty-two years of loyal service. Thirty-two years of making problems disappear for families whose names were carved into the very foundations of American and Earth’s power.

Evidence that should have buried Legacy heirs? Vanished. Witnesses who should have talked? Relocated or silenced. Cases that should have toppled dynasties? Closed, sealed, buried so deep archaeologists would never find the graves.

The Heavenchilds owed him. The Castellanos owed him. The Maxtons, The Roth-Fairchilds, Prices, Howards, Prestons — every single Legacy family with a son stupid enough to leave glaring evidence of their sins owed Chief Morrison favors that could wallpaper this miserable cell.

And now here he was.

Arrested by the FBI like some common thug, all because the O’Neil case had detonated in ways no one predicted. Kyle’s family had gotten sloppy The cover-up had gotten sloppier. When the dominoes fell, Morrison’s name had been etched into too many of them to deny.

But he wasn’t worried.

Not really.

A few cells away, Kyle himself was here too, should be slept on a cot just as thin, just as rough yet enjoying privileges no teenage murderer should have: special meals, private lawyer meetings, a prison cell that looked like a vacation apartment, the quiet certainty that this was temporary.

The storm would pass.

The machinery that protected Legacy blood would free them both.

Morrison understood perfectly.

Because the same machine that would free Kyle would free him. Not one family — many. All of them bound to him by secrets that could end their precious heir boys, unravel generations of carefully constructed power, and bring Paradise crashing down around their gilded ears.

They needed him alive. They needed him free and silent about every disappeared corpse, every fabricated alibi, every midnight call that had kept their sons out of cages exactly like this one.

And they knew — oh, they knew — that the former Chief had contingencies.

Files. Recordings. Documents scattered across safety deposit boxes in twelve countries, held by lawyers with ironclad instructions: release everything if Morrison died under suspicious circumstances.

Kill him? And every Legacy family in Paradise would burn together in one glorious bonfire of mutual destruction.

So all he had to do was wait.

Let the storm pass.

Get the hell out of here alive and unscathed and—

Throb.

Morrison’s thought died mid-formation, severed like a throat cut in the dark.

The darkness in the cell pulsed in a single, violent contraction that had nothing to do with light, shadow, or any natural phenomenon he had witnessed in thirty-two years of cleaning up the impossible.

It was as if the darkness itself had drawn a slow, wet breath… and then squeezed.

His eyes bulged grotesquely.

There was a deathly grip on his throat and the pressure on his windpipe was absolute —

A pure, living, starving darkness gripping his throat with the casual intimacy of a lover who had decided he no longer deserved to breathe. Black pressure leaked outward from the point of contact, thick rivulets of liquid night seeping into his skin, crawling down his neck like ink injected straight into veins.

His cellmates felt it too.

For one frozen fraction of a second their eyes snapped open — all of them registering the soul-deep wrongness, the impossible weight crushing their chests like a mountain of graves.

Then the ripple of darkness hit them as more visible wave of black leaked from the walls and slammed into their bodies.

Their faces twisted in silent agony as darkness poured into their mouths, their nostrils, their eyes. They collapsed. Unconscious like puppets with their strings severed, bodies going limp in perfect, synchronized silence while thin trails of black ichor leaked from their ears and nostrils, pooling slowly on the filthy floor.

Morrison couldn’t scream.

His throat no longer belonged to him. The darkness had already invaded, leaking deeper, filling his lungs with wet, suffocating shadow that tasted of old blood and forgotten screams.

The darkness moved.

It peeled away from the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling in long, dripping sheets — thick, viscous tendrils of absolute black that leaked and dripped as they moved, leaving behind glistening black residue that hissed and smoked where it touched concrete.

The tendrils coalesced into shapes that hurt to perceive, jagged and unfinished, making his eyes bleed and his brain howl warnings his body could no longer obey. The shadows formed hands. Real hands.

Massive fingers of solidified night, dripping fresh darkness with every motion, that wrapped around his arms, legs, and torso with deliberate, savoring slowness.

He rose from the cot like a rag doll being plucked from a child’s bed by something that wanted to play with its food.

The shadowy hands carried him upward, black ichor leaking from between their fingers and splattering onto the thin blanket below in heavy, corrosive drops that ate through fabric and began dissolving the metal frame of the cot.

Then —

SLAM.

His back smashed into the ceiling with bone-shattering force, ribs cracking like dry twigs under a boot. Pain detonated through his spine, his skull, every nerve screaming in frequencies flesh was never meant to produce.

Fresh darkness leaked from the impact point, seeping into the cracks in the ceiling and spreading outward in black veins that pulsed with unnatural life.

Before the agony could fully register, the hands reversed direction with cruel precision.

SLAM.