My Taboo Harem!

Cassiopeia had just settled deeper into his chest when the notification bloomed across his vision.

[DING!]

[MISSION COMPLETE — DAMSEL IN DISTRESS]

Host has performed beyond expected parameters.

Bonus rewards unlocked.

[Initial Reward: DxD Element — COSMIC DRAGON FACE MANIFEST]

[Bonuses Applied From: Quick Mission Completion Fairy Companion Deployment and Live Cuckolding — Hidden Mission Completed!]

[Live Cuckolding — Description: Fuck and cuckold a man while he watches his woman being taken away from him.]

[Reward: Mystery Box — claimable at Host’s convenience.]

[Mission Completion Bonus: Super Abilities Mystery Box.]

A slow, predatory smile spread across Phei’s face.

Eira had been thorough. Cruelly, artistically, perfectly thorough.

Whatever the fairy had done to Jonathan Montgomery in the hours since Phei had left that bedroom — whatever she’d reached into his mind and rearranged, whatever nightmares she’d stitched into the raw meat of his psyche with needle and thread made of his own screams — had clearly exceeded every threshold the System had set for the mission.

That man would never again sit at the head of a dinner table without his hands shaking so violently he spilled wine across the tablecloth like blood.

And most importantly, he’d never again raise his hand to a woman without feeling the cold ghost of what had been done to him clawing up his throat until he vomited.

Good. Some lessons had to sink down to the bone and rot there, becoming the new foundation of whatever was left of his soul.

He was about to tap through the notifications — open the Mystery Boxes, see what DxD Element had arrived, let himself enjoy the rewards — when the air in the lounge bent sideways.

A void portal tore open three feet from the chair, edges writhing like living wounds in reality itself.

Through it, on the other side, Phei saw what remained of Jonathan Montgomery.

And behind him, Eira was standing with her arms folded, a small, serene smile curling her lips like a mother proud of her finest work.

“Come, Master. He’s been waiting for you.”

Phei gently eased Cassiopeia off his chest and stood. He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead, stepped toward the portal, and crossed through before it could seal itself shut behind him.

Her jaw fell open.

She stared at the empty chair, at the faint shimmer where the portal had been and said absolutely nothing, because there was absolutely nothing to say.

**

The Montgomery master bedroom had not aged but died.

The bed was overturned — mattress gutted down the middle, feathers and horsehair spilling across the carpet in wet clumps soaked through with fluids that should never have come from a human body.

The walls dripped.

Long, slow runnels of something dark slid down the expensive walls from the ceiling, pooling along the baseboards in thick black puddles that caught the light wrong and refused to reflect. Blood, in places.

Shadow, in others. Some of it was still moving — slow, tasting the air like blind worms.

The chandelier had shattered, three hundred pieces of Austrian crystal scattered across the hardwood in a long, jagged constellation.

A few of the larger shards stood upright, driven into the floor like fangs, catching what little light remained and splintering it into sickly rainbows across the walls and across the ruin of the man who knelt among them.

The air reeked of absolute human ruin. Piss had soaked into the carpet in a dark halo around where he knelt, gone cold and crusty hours ago.

Bile in drying streaks down the front of what remained of his shirt.

Underneath all of it: the sour stink of dehydration, the ammonia stink of a body that had been emptying itself in every direction for too long, and something worse — the metallic-sweet rot of flesh that had been opened, healed, opened again, over and over until the smell of living decay clung to him like a second skin.

Jonathan Montgomery knelt in the middle of it.

Cruel Eira. Phei winced but felt no sympathy for Jonathan.

His legs were bent beneath him at angles his own skeleton should have refused to survive.

Both kneecaps sat wrong — crushed and reassembled and crushed again, the patella on the left visibly off-center where Eira had stopped putting it back perfectly, bone grinding against bone with every microscopic twitch.

His hands trembled in his lap, though trembled was generous: they shook in constant, visible waves, every tendon jumping beneath the skin like fish dying in shallow water with fingernails that were missing, all ten of them.

Some had been pulled out cleanly while others had been torn off in pieces, then regrown halfway, then torn off again — the nailbeds were wet, red, furred with something that might have been new keratin trying desperately to form and failing, each failed growth sending fresh spikes of pain up nerves that had already been flayed raw.

Three of his fingers bent the wrong way and stayed that way, the joints popped and reset and popped again until the pain had become a constant, living heartbeat in his hands.

His teeth — what remained of them — sat in his mouth in no particular order. Several were missing entirely.

Several others had clearly been removed, healed back, and removed again in different positions, because the molars didn’t line up the way molars were supposed to line up, and the front incisors were crooked in a way they’d never been in any of his headshots.

Every time he tried to close his mouth the broken edges scraped against raw gums and fresh nerves, sending white-hot lightning straight into his brain.

His gums bled slowly and constantly… a thin pink runnel of saliva strung from his lower lip down to his chin, pooling and dripping in a steady metronome that he could no longer stop.

His skin was the worst part.

Patches of it had been removed. She had not torn them, that was mercy — removed, peeled back with patient care, then healed, then peeled back along a slightly different seam.

Eira had taken her time… all the time in the world, in fact as far as Phei could tell.

The skin on his left forearm was a quilt of slightly mismatched textures, some smooth, some puckered, some still glistening with fresh pink where she hadn’t bothered to finish the final layer.

Bite marks crescented his neck — dozens of them — from teeth that weren’t in the room and hadn’t been in the room and had existed only in the nightmares she’d stitched into his skull, each mark sunk deep enough to scrape bone before the healing began again.

His hair hung in greasy strings across a face that had once commanded federal judges and now looked like a wet rag someone had forgotten to wring out and then beaten against concrete for sport.

His eyes were open.

They were the only part of him that still looked like Jonathan — wide, bloodshot, tracking every shift in the air around him with frantic, animal awareness.

He no longer believed that closing his eyes would protect him from anything.

Because closing his eyes was worse. Closing his eyes was where she lived. Where the nightmares waited with a smile and her endless, creative patience.

Where the only mercy was him being forced to relive every second of his cuckolding in perfect, unending detail — Phei taking Roxanne again and again while Jonathan was made to watch, helpless, broken, leaking from every orifice while the fairy whispered exactly how much better the dragon was, how much louder Roxanne screamed for him, how completely Jonathan had failed as a man.

He was closer to death than any living thing had any right to be.

Yet he was kept alive… conscious and aware.

The portal shimmered shut behind Phei with a wet, sucking finality.

Jonathan saw him.

And the sound that ripped out of him was not a scream.

A scream required moisture. Jonathan had none left… he had cried himself dry hours ago, pissed out whatever hydration remained around hour five, and the noise that tore free of his throat now was something dryer and worse — a dust-rattle, a high keening squeal that split midway through as his vocal cords finally gave up and frayed like old rope.

The second half of the sound came out as a whistle. A wet, bubbling whistle through a voice box that no longer worked, thick with phlegm and blood and the raw ruin of everything Eira had carved out of him.

His whole body seized with every muscle locking at once in a full-body tetanus of terror, jaw snapping shut so hard that one of the regrown molars cracked in half with an audible pop and spat forward onto his ruined shirt in a spray of enamel and blood.

His eyes rolled back until only the bloodshot whites showed.