My Taboo Harem!

The warmth at his back deepened, gentle and unwavering, a silken promise that whispered of course, of course, whatever you need. Marcus’s jaw unlocked by half a notch. His shoulders dropped a fraction.

His shoulders dropped another notch.

Behind him, Paige and Brielle watched the dragon with an entirely different flavor of envy — softer, almost wistful.

They had not been raised to view those women as property to be claimed. They had been raised to see them as unreachable constellations: the Paradise Princesses whose very existence had birthed their private chat group.

Sierra, Maddie, Elena — the girls Paige and Brielle had quietly aspired to become.

The dragon standing at the radiant center of all that pre-existing aspiration, glowing with whatever invisible gravity made hardened hotel staff bow without payment or prompting, was not a thief in their eyes.

He was simply… there. Like gravity. Like weather.

A new, permanent law of the social cosmos.

And they had been told they could enter his orbit.

Sir. Elliot had said so. The head maid back home… had confirmed it. They could spend time with Phei during this trip. They could sit at the same tables. Swim in the same pools. Breathe the same air as him, for as long as they wished — provided they never forgot they were Heavenchilds.

And they would be on his floor.

His floor.

Brielle’s hand crept sideways and squeezed Paige’s. Paige squeezed back. Both pairs of wide blue eyes tracked the elevator doors as Phei’s group filed inside — Cassiopeia entering with Sierra and Valentina, Phei gesturing the rest of his women through with that easy, patient courtesy never once extended to Marcus’s sisters at any Legacy function in their lives.

The twins exhaled together, a single soft breath of wonder.

Days of being on the same floor as that boy.

Days of maybe.

A few paces beside the twins, hovering at the very edge of the Heavenchild cluster like an forgotten piece of furniture no one had remembered to position properly, stood another woman.

She had no introduction. No name was murmured around her. No member of the family openly acknowledged her presence, though all tolerated it as one tolerates an old, expensive painting that no longer matches the décor.

She was tall — or had been, once.

Whatever now held her upright was a frame too thin and brittle to deserve the word, draped in a charcoal-grey dress whose cut had once been exquisitely expensive and now simply hung from a body that no longer remembered how to fill clothes.

Her hair was pale — bleached by time or sorrow or both — the color of something that had forgotten what shade it was meant to be. Her face remained beautiful in a museum-piece way: perfectly arranged features, delicate cheekbones, a mouth shaped for laughter it had long since abandoned.

The makeup around her eyes had been applied with skilled, patient hands.

The jewelry at her throat was old, real, and likely worth more than most men’s lifetimes.

But her eyes—

Her eyes were the wrong thing entirely.

Wide. Pale. Unblinking. Not vacant — vacancy implied something had once lived there and left an absence. This was different. These eyes did not look as though they had ever held anything at all. They resembled windows in a house long abandoned, where even the memory of inhabitants had been bleached from the wallpaper.

A husk.

That was the only honest word for what stood there. A husk of a woman. A body kept dressed and upright because some Heavenchild calendar demanded she appear in photographs, and some Heavenchild ledger required her name on legal documents.

Whoever had once laughed, argued, wept, made love, or told jokes at dinner tables inside that form was simply… not in residence anymore.

She did not look at Elliot.

She did not look at Marcus.

She did not look at the twins.

She looked only at the elevator across the lobby.

And as the doors began to slide shut —

Phei’s amethyst eyes happened to drift across the lobby for the briefest fraction of a second. An absent sweep — the casual glance of a young man taking final inventory of a busy room before the world sealed itself away from him.

His gaze caught hers.

Held.

For one single, impossible heartbeat.

The hollow, white, unblinking eyes of the husk met warm, living amethyst. Phei was a stranger to her in every recordable sense — they had never met, she had never attended any function he had graced, no recollection of her had ever appeared in any memories Eira had consumed — and yet the contact lasted half a second longer than either should have allowed.

Then the elevator doors slid shut between them with a soft, golden chime.

Inside the car, Phei lifted one hand to the corner of his right eye.

Something wet had gathered there. A single drop of moisture slid down the curve of his cheek.

He brushed it away with the side of his thumb and stared at the faint residue on his skin with mild, uncomprehending surprise — the sort of reaction his body produced when something ancient had passed through him that his mind had not yet bothered to register.

He blinked once.

The tear was already gone.

But the strange, hollow ache it left behind lingered.

‘A reflection, probably.’ The mirrored panel along the back of the elevator had caught a stray shaft of lobby light at the wrong angle and driven a pinpoint flare directly into his eye. Such things happened in heavily illuminated spaces.

The eye watered without permission, nothing more.

Phei wiped his thumb discreetly on a handkerchief and let the moment dissolve.

Beside him, Sierra leaned her head against his shoulder with quiet trust. Maddie was already pressing the penthouse button with theatrical solemnity, as though crowning herself elevator operator of the year.

Cassiopeia murmured something low and fond to Valentina that drew a bright, unguarded laugh from the woman — the sound warm and effortless in the enclosed space.

The elevator began its smooth, silent ascent.

Phei did not look back.

He had no reason to.

Out in the lobby — now separated by twenty-seven floors of steel cable and rising silence — the husk-eyed woman remained exactly where she had been placed. Her gaze did not drop from the closed elevator doors.

Her body did not shift. Her hands hung limp at her sides like things that had long forgotten they were attached to her.

Marcus, glancing back to ensure no one in the family cluster had embarrassed them by drifting out of formation, saw only what he always saw: the husk-eyed woman standing precisely where she had been positioned. Looking at nothing.

He turned his attention forward again without a second thought.

He did not see what Anahita saw, two paces behind him.

He did not see the single, perfect tear that had begun — slowly, soundlessly, almost reverently — to trace a glistening path down the husk-eyed woman’s perfectly painted cheek.

It slipped past the corner of her mouth, trembled at the edge of her chin, and fell.

A small, glistening drop of something that had once been human.