My Taboo Harem!

Night Before Phei Woke Up…

Eira watched the woman through the window, feeling a quiet ache that made her wonder if her own sense of autonomy was just as fragile and enervating.

To be that: to exist as nothing more than a living weapon with excellent posture. Following orders could be enervating.

And most importantly, it sometimes felt as though such beings possessed no life of their own outside the immediate marionette duties assigned by their masters, mistresses, or whatever saccharine nomenclature they draped over the arrangement to make the collar look like jewellery.

Eira knew this intimately.

She was, after all, a spirit. A bound entity. An Elemental Fairy tethered to the volition of a sovereign by rules older than the language she used to curse them.

She understood servitude — its slow, graceful diminishment, the gradual erosion of selfhood that came with centuries of yes, master and at once, master and as you command, master, until the word began to feel like a borrowed syllable in a tongue one had forgotten one once spoke fluently.

‘And yet.’

Beings like that woman — like the blade-servants and the silent executioners and the thousand-year instruments of their masters’ machinations — sometimes felt as though they possessed no existence outside the designation. No interiority. No private afternoon reclining somewhere comfortable, ruminating upon absolutely nothing, consuming something pointless and sweet simply because it tasted agreeable.

They were puppets — immaculately lethal, cosmically puissant, undeniably magnificent puppets — but puppets nonetheless, dressed up in whatever title their owners preferred to render the leash invisible.

Consort. Blade. Right Hand. Most Trusted.

All very pretty words for the thing I own that kills people for me.

Could she have been in the same position? Perhaps.

Suppose her master had been someone else — some imperious, calculating, cosmically entitled sovereign who viewed his familiar as an extension of his will rather than a person in her own right. She would have followed every order, liked it or not, because that was the architecture of the bond, and the bond did not negotiate.

But her master was Phei.

And Phei, no matter what redoubtable façade he erected for the consumption of the world — no matter how the amethyst eyes went vitreous and the voice descended to that particular subzero register that made grown men reconsider their allegiance to continence — was, beneath it all, something far more dangerous than a tyrant — Phei was in the end a softie!

‘Phei, in the end, was a softie. A lethal, velvet-gloved marshmallow softie who could order a massacre and then apologize to the flowers for the mess.’

‘Wait.’

‘Nah.’

She denounced her own assessment before the syllables had finished forming in her mind and retracted it. Incinerated it. Scattered the ashes across the void between thoughts and hoped nobody had heard her think something that catastrophically inaccurate.

This Phei — the Phei she observed through the intimate, privileged aperture of their bond, the Phei whose internal landscape she navigated daily like a cartographer mapping a continent that kept sprouting new volcanoes — was nowhere near what he presented to the world.

And the cruelty he dispensed to his enemies?

The things the world had witnessed him perpetrate?

‘That isn’t even close to what hell he has in store for them.’

The enslavement of them was no way the end of it at all.

That was the prologue. The opening sentence in a narrative of perdition so comprehensive in its architecture that the subjects themselves had not yet grasped they were merely in the table of contents.

So nah. Phei was no softy.

But he was empathetic. Magnanimous. Tender-hearted. All the cardinal virtues — but exclusively toward those he cherished. His loved ones only. And most importantly — most bewilderingly, most infuriatingly, most Phei of all — forgiving.

That was the part that vexed her.

Knowing what manner of exquisite little devil resided beneath the warm exterior, Eira had been genuinely stupefied that he’d admitted Sierra and Delilah into his harem. Those two — along with Victoria — had been the closest to the boys. The Circle of Cowards’ adjacent orbit. They hadn’t perpetrated the atrocities the males had, nor had they been present on the rooftop that took his girlfriend, and not even 10% of the reasons he’d gone to kill himself.

Hadn’t held the camera or swung the fist. But they hadn’t been innocent either, or yet he had absolved them.

Was it because Delilah and Victoria were family? Perhaps. But he hadn’t fully forgiven Victoria — if he ever would. That particular ledger remained open, its balance denominated in a currency Eira could not name, and Phei had not yet decided how to spend.

Anyway.

The point was — and she had been circling toward the point with the characteristically meandering flight path of a fairy whose mind worked in spirals rather than straight lines — the point was actually looking at this woman.

Consort.

High above the ground of Hell’s Paradise Island, suspended in the gelid darkness outside Phei’s penthouse, the woman’s silhouette was like a moth that had confused a dragon’s window for a lantern, entranced by it, her small form outlined against the abyss with an almost infuriating clarity.

The space above the island embraced her the way darkness embraces a flame — not to extinguish but to frame. To give her edges. To provide the contrast against which her silhouette could exist in its full, infuriating clarity.

The night wrapped itself around her small frame with the reverent, almost proprietary possessiveness of a void that had learned, across millennia, that this particular body was a permanent resident of its upper echelons and would neither ask permission to occupy them nor accept a request to vacate.

The chill tried to clung to her bare legs — those pale, sculpted, scandalously exposed pillars of flesh that descended from the abbreviated hem of her kimono into the freezing dark like the columns of a temple that had neglected to install walls — and found, with the quiet humiliation of a force of nature being spurned by something that did not acknowledge its jurisdiction, that it could not hold.

The cold reached her skin and slid off, lapped at her thighs and retreated.

Attempted to settle in the hollows behind her knees, in the delicate architecture of her ankles, in the spaces between her bare toes — and was rebuffed at every point of contact with the effortless, unconscious disdain of a body whose internal temperature was governed by laws the mortal atmosphere had never been introduced to.

Yet it didn’t touch her. Not really. Not the way cold ought to touch a woman standing almost half-naked in the upper atmosphere of a resort island at an hour when sensible beings were either asleep or quietly reconsidering every life choice that had led them to this altitude.

The katana-wielding shortie simply hovered there, katana resting across her shoulders like a bored executioner waiting for the next neck to arrive, radiating the serene indifference of someone who had long ago decided that weather, physics, and good sense were all optional suggestions best ignored.