My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 822: Ghosted

Eira slumbered on, a vision of sinful repose that would have made even the most jaded arch-succubus of the elder ages blush with envious recollection.

By any veracious measure, it was a record for her to sleep this much.

He had inspected twice from across the vestibule and found the bond stubbornly quiescent each time — not unconscious quiescent, but the soft, contented, satisfied and unresponsive torpor as though she had crawled into the wrong sarcophagus at sunrise, drawn the lid shut behind her with both diminutive hands, and politely declined all further engagements with the conscious world.

The Original Void-Ice Fairy. Ancient. Imperious and yet she was currently drooling, faintly, into a pillow embroidered with someone else’s initials, her lithe, alabaster form splayed across the sheets in the most wanton tableau of utter surrender:

Her one slender arm flung above her head as though in final, ecstatic defeat, the delicate swell of her big breasts were rising and falling in the languid cadence of profound satiation, rosy nipples still faintly peaked and tender from the relentless worship of his mouth.

To top onto the beautiful scene; Eira’s thighs were parted in shameless invitation even in sleep, the inner silk of them glistening with the mingled evidence of their shared ruin — a small, crystalline puddle of her own nectar poured out of her depths, marking her as thoroughly attractive and inviting.

’That’s redundant.’ Then again the two words were different as much as they were the same; no?

Phei had not done that much to her.

Sixty percent of the Goddess Fall Touch, his mouth and his hands.

He’d done so with the patient, unhurried ministrations as he had for once, resolved that the lesson would be administered without haste, without escalation, or characteristic predatory tempo that made his other women grip bedsheets and reconsider their theological positions.

Eira had capitulated on the fifth heaven.

’There are two more; sixth and the seventh.’

He had been formulating the diplomatic language necessary to apprise her of this fact when she had ceased responding to verbal stimuli and begun responding exclusively to her own pulse, and the question had quietly adjudicated itself.

The fairy was a puddle. A small, crystalline, magnificently debauched puddle.

And the puddle was not waking up for anything short of the heat death of the universe — and even then, she would probably request five more minutes, her body still humming with the aftershocks of Goddess Fall Touch, that exquisite, merciless art that had reduced an ancient, imperious being to this boneless, glistening offering of feminine surrender.

Goddess Fall Touch was, on the accumulated evidence, precisely what the system said.

He left her in the small, exquisite ruin she had earned and drew the bedroom door shut behind him with the soft click like he was closing the door on a piece of artisanship he was rather satisfied with.

The penthouse received him with silence.

Cassiopeia had not appeared yet.

She was back to the hotel; their bond had told him that much approximately prior the time with Melissa — her gravitational weight returning to its proper orbit somewhere on this floor or an adjacent one.

She was here. And yet... she was not coming to him.

He let her be.

She had departed her family’s ancestral estate this afternoon carrying a piece of orchestration information he had inscribed into her, and whatever she had executed he knew she had done so within the parameters of that script.

He didn’t require Slave Sight to see what she was doing now; Phei didn’t even particularly desire it.

The entire purpose of inscribing a piece of work into a woman of Cassiopeia’s caliber was to relinquish the reins he had on her and permit her to perform.

’Let her do her work.’

He’d be ruining his own surprise if he peeked.

Now though, Phei felt, very faintly, lonely.

Which was — candidly — preposterous.

A Dragon, the Void-Ice overlord and in the same breathe; the boy who had enslaved progenitors and carved eternal scars on Legacy heirs now stood alone in his penthouse, abandoned on a weeknight by his women who had collectively decided that whatever they were doing was more important than him — ’I am like a king dethroned not by blade or betrayal, but by the quiet, devastating conspiracy of my women in a group chat I am no longer invited to join.’

The girls had ghosted him. Politely, with the synchronized, meticulously coordinated conspiracy they had cooked in a group chat he was no longer privy to.

He suspected the group chat had a name. He suspected the name was unflattering to him specifically.

Something wickedly precise, no doubt — "Dragon’s Daycare" or "How to Civilize the Void-Ice Tyrant Before He Ruins Another Set of Sheets" — a roasting council where his harem plotted their temporary emancipation with the gleeful precision of generals and the wicked delight of schoolgirls sharpening their claws.

He suspected this with the bone-deep certainty of a man who had been outmaneuvered by collective feminine intelligence before and recognized the operational signature.

Maddie — indisposed. Sierra — indisposed. Delilah — indisposed. Patricia and Valentina — indisposed.

All of them transmitting, through whichever bonds connected them to him, the same patient, warm, immovable signal that signified "we adore you, sweetheart, but please we will be elsewhere, we are conducting girl things."

He had learned, over the preceding weeks, that girl things could denote anything from a manicure to the strategic planning of a coup d’état if it was Maddie in the lead.

’Ghosted by my own harem who had collectively decided that whatever they were doing is more important than me.’

Humbling. Genuinely, profoundly, existentially humbling.

He almost respected it.

A few hours remained until the fitting with Emily, Catrina, Lydia, and the boys.

Which meant; a few unscheduled hours of his own.

He could train.

Eira’s training had been unambiguous that the western wall could, on solicitation, be rendered considerably less hospitable to a Dragon’s vertebral column come morning.

He could march back into the cathedral hollow tonight and resume precisely where he had concluded this afternoon — the slow, methodical, bone-grinding training his combat proficiency that his body was beginning to accept and his pride was beginning to enjoy.

But he did not want to march back into anything.

He had utilized his powers sufficiently today.

The evening’s allocation of mystical toll had been disbursed in its entirety, and the his reserves were, if not depleted, then at minimum requesting that its proprietor consider an interval of fiscal restraint.

Which left him with nothing but time; alone in a quiet penthouse.

By Phei’s own judgment, this was the exact situation where his mind always started wandering into places he had been working hard to avoid.

The penthouse settled around him with that soft, expensive quiet that happens when there’s no woman left to fill the space.

He could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning keeping the room cool even though no one was there to enjoy it.

The clock ticked so softly he almost missed it...

...And the silence itself grew thicker, heavier, and more personal than usual — like it was settling in for a long talk with him.

He felt a cold draft coming from under the door.