My Taboo Harem!

The ceiling was white… an immense pale expanse of it, unhurried and indifferent, the very colour of clinical absolution, broken only by recessed lighting that dimmed itself by half the instant his eyes opened.

The suite’s system registered his waking and answered with the quiet courtesy of a thing trained to be discreet, as though even the fixtures had been briefed on the delicacy of dragons returning from the abyss.

His body lay heavy on silk, carefully positioned. Someone had tended him here, rolling him into this exact posture and adjusting him over the slow crawl of hours, keeping him comfortable while he was elsewhere.

‘How charming. The unmarked conqueror of souls, reduced to a porcelain doll in my own bed. The universe and its little jokes.’

Then he felt a small warm weight on his right hand.

He turned his head.

Cassiopeia sat on the edge of the bed in a pale grey cashmere sweater slightly too large for her — the kind a woman steals from her lover’s drawer because she cannot bear her own clothes, as though his scent might ward off the cosmic joke that had nearly claimed him.

Her long legs folded beneath her, her hair drawn into a low knot that had come undone along one side, trailing a loose dark strand across her cheekbone like a single thread of unravelled composure.

Her hand wrapped around his right hand, not tightly, but constantly, as though letting go would permit something unbearable — the final absurd punchline to the evening’s grand performance: the dutiful sister of the conspiracy, now a trembling sentinel at the bedside of the man she had spent hours convincing her family she was ready to betray him.

Her eyes were ruined, red-rimmed, whites threaded with broken capillaries, lower lashes clumped into wet dark points.

Slow wet tracks ran from the outer corner of each eye down her cheekbones, disappearing into the hollow beneath her jaw where salt had begun to crust.

Her nose was pink at the tip.

Her lower lip was bitten raw. She had been crying for a long time, the sort of silent aristocratic weeping Legacy daughters were never supposed to master, yet here she performed it with lethal competence.

His shirt along the right shoulder bore the evidence — a wet irregular oval where her cheek had rested, another darker patch higher up where tears had soaked through the silk, clinging to his collarbone like a lover’s reluctant confession.

Her eyes registered the small movement of his head.

She made a sound — the thin broken shape a sound makes after being held inside a throat for six hours, a wet hitch, the start of a syllable that never completed.

Then she folded and her trained composure gave way along every seam at once; shoulders dropping, body collapsing forward, cheek finding his chest, hand still gripping his as though it was the only anchor keeping her from fragmenting.

Her other hand fisted uselessly in his shirt. Her forehead pressed hard into the hollow beneath his collarbone.

And she cried.

Silently. In racking convulsions of the shoulders, breath coming in thin whistling whimpers, fresh tears dropping hot and irregular onto his throat, tracking down through older salt, soaking the silk until it turned translucent against his skin.

Her whole frame shook against him. Her hair against his jaw smelled of lavender and fear.

‘Fear. The rarest perfume on a Maxton.’

“You weren’t moving.”

Her voice was wrecked.

“You came through the portal and your — your body —”

She shuddered hard against him.

“There were cracks all over your whole body; along your arms, along your chest, opening and closing as though something inside you couldn’t decide whether to stay contained. They were leaking, Phei. Red and black together. Like oil and blood refusing to mix yet refusing to separate, sliding over each other out of your skin and down your ribs, pooling on the sheets beneath you.”

Her fingers tightened spasmodically on his hand.

“The first sheets were ruined. White silk. I watched it spread from the size of my palm to a dinner plate to the size of me, and I couldn’t move you. I was afraid moving you would make the cracks widen. I tried to hold you once and the moment my palm touched your ribs a new crack opened underneath my hand.

“Like my touch was causing it. So, I let go. I sat there and watched it bleed out of you for hours, and I couldn’t even touch you, I couldn’t even —”

She cut herself off and pressed her forehead harder against his collarbone, refusing to say the word.

Another long wet convulsion ran through her. Fresh hot tears slipped under the collar of his shirt, tracking across his chest in a slow, salty anointing.

Phei lay beneath her, perfectly still. Part of him remained in the room, warm and absurdly cherished, while another part still lingered elsewhere, savouring the fresh echo of a soul freshly branded and bent to his will.

The contrast was exquisite.

The Maxton sister and his slave weeping over the monster she had sworn to help destroy, while the monster luxuriated in the wetness of her terror-turned-relief.

‘How droll. How perfectly, grotesquely right.’

His fingers curled slowly into her captured hand, offering a small answering pressure. She made another thin wet sound against his shoulder. His free hand rose, unhurried, and settled along the back of her head, fingers threading through the loose dark strands at her nape.

He simply held.

His gaze drifted past the curve of her hair, across the pale reach of the bedroom, and came to rest on a small crystalline figure hovering near the floor-to-ceiling window. Wings perfectly still, eyes already fixated on him.

‘Eira.’

Her voice arrived gentle, unhurried, and entirely private — the tone of a familiar who had just performed a miracle and awaited applause.

“I brought you back through the portal myself, master.”

A single unhurried beat.

“Also, do not worry, one on the island felt so much as a tremor.”

Another beat.

“Kyle Abrams-Manson is enslaved and every trace of what happened tonight has been erased — from the prison, the residual overflow across the forest canopy, the scarring on the hollow’s moss floor, the displacement imprint on the federal prison cell where the portal originated.

“All of it, gone. No one will suspect that anything has even happened. Kyle will wake in his cell tomorrow morning with the Mark invisibly branded onto his forehead — unreadable to every pair of eyes in this world except yours and his.”

A pause.

“Of course I have enslaved the bastard.”

The last line arrived faintly smug, a familiar’s quiet pride at having anticipated every question he had not yet asked.

Phei’s mouth moved. A slow, private curve — the smile of a dragon freshly sated on another man’s subjugation while his another dangerous ally wept genuine tears of relief into the silk over his heart.