My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 842: Danton’s Fear?

Aiden, who was the most fortunate of the three, and knew it, and hated that he knew it.

Phei had only taken fingers. A few, from the right hand — which Aiden had interpreted, in the private arithmetic of men who measure their ruinagainst each other’s; as mercy.

Compared to Zack’s obliterated manhood and Anderson’s permanent scar that the whole world could see, a few missing fingers was practically a gift like a love note and gentle reminder, written in amputation, that the Cosmic Dragon could have taken more and had simply chosen not to.

Aiden flexed the remaining fingers sometimes when he thought no one was watching, as though he could still feel the ones that were gone — phantom digits that had become the only honest part of him left.

He had managed, through the Collins family’s healthcare empire — shadow rulers of medicine, quiet owners of hospitals that bore other people’s names — to acquire artificial replacements.

Prosthetics so advanced they moved with near-perfect fidelity, each joint articulating with mechanical grace.

And he had hidden them inside a black leather glove, fitted, extending to mid-forearm.

To anyone looking it appeared stylish. Deliberate. A fashion choice that whispered I am someone who wears one glove to a club and makes it work.

No one knew it was a burial shroud.

Of the three, Aiden had drawn the lightest sentence, and he wore it like the heaviest.

Kyle snickered. Silently. Privately behind a face so placid it could have been carved from milk glass.

He observed the three wounded boys hovering around Danton and Marcus with the unhurried amusement like he was watching very interesting watching animals circle a watering hole that he knew, from personal experience, was poisoned.

They were very sure Danton would protect them from Phei, after all he was more powerful than Phei!

The snicker never reached Kyle’s mouth. It lived in his eyes — a faint, arctic glitter that said I see you, and I find this hilarious, and I will never tell you why.

Because even the seemingly carefree Danton — who projected ease the way a lighthouse projects light, automatically and in all directions — was always wary of Phei.

No one seemed to notice but Kyle did see it in the micro-hesitations, the way Danton’s eyes swept exits in the casual way like he was double-checking for escape routes. There were the faint tightness at the corners of his grin whenever Phei’s name surfaced in conversation.

The World Serpent, Jörmungandr reborn, currently stronger than the Cosmic Dragon by any measurable ranking; and yet still, somewhere beneath the golden flames and the easy menace, afraid of Phei.

Kyle found all this endlessly amusing.

Derek Roth-Fairchild walked at the back of the group with his shoulders slumped despite the good frame that should have carried them otherwise.

Every time they were all together, Derek folded inward, diminished himself, became small — a boy whose family owned American banking and whose progenitor, in the memories trickling back through every heir in the Circle; Derek had been something so terrifying that others flinched at the recollection of it.

Was he still pretending?Had he simply not awakened?Or had the memories of what he was had not reached him yet; that would remind him what he was, who he had been, why the other Progenitors watched him from the corners of their eyes with a wariness they reserved for nothing else?

Kyle had stopped trying to figure it out. Derek was Derek — either completely dormant, or performing dormancy so convincingly that the difference had become academic.

Either way, the result was the same: a boy slumped at the back of the Circle was carrying something heavy enough that he’d decided it was safer to carry it down rather than up.

He was a figure of fear itself.

Kyle respected that, in his own detached way.

The group settled into the violet dark of Elysium. Music hit them — deep, throbbing bass that lived in the chest rather than the ears, sound engineered to make thinking marginally harder and feeling marginally easier. The club was full. Bodies and wealth and the sharp cologne of entitlement.

Every eye in the room turned toward the entrance as they entered, and mostly — inevitably, irresistibly — toward Marcus.

The whispering started immediately.

It had been hours since the Empyrean Dining Hall. Hours since Phei had made the Prince of Earth into the Prince of Puddles, and by now every soul with a phone on Hell’s Paradise Island had watched the footage:

’Heck — this is the Prince of Earth. It is safe to assume half the world had seen it.’

The clips had written their own captions. The memes had bred like rabbits. The internet had done what the internet does to a man who pisses himself on a livestream watched by five hundred thousand people, which is to say: it had been merciless.

And Marcus knew it; Kyle could see it in the rigid geometry of his posture. He felt every whisper land on him like a small, precise incision, the weight of every sideways glance, every poorly suppressed grin, and every phone angled just slightly too deliberately in his direction.

He was making a walk of shame and he knew it, even if admitting it aloud would have killed him faster than Phei’s aura had.

They found a table and as they sat, drinks were ordered with the mechanical efficiency of boys performing normalcy.

Kyle smiled.

The smile was thin, private; he was watching a stage play he had already seen the ending of.

He settled back in his chair with the liquid ease, he had made peace with his new fate as Phei’s slave after hours of struggle and endless pain on his soul and therefore could relax into it completely.

And then a voice rang out across the club.

Clear. Loud and pitched with the exquisite precision like it had been waiting — genuinely, delightedly waiting — for this exact moment, the way a comedian waits for the beat before the punchline, the way a sniper waits for the exhale before the squeeze:

"PRINCE OF PUDDLES!"

The entire club froze.

The music kept playing. The bass kept throbbing. But every human body in Elysium locked in place — drinks halfway to mouths, conversations severed mid-syllable, heads turning in unison toward the source of the shout with the synchronized horror of an audience that has just heard a gunshot at a wedding.

The Circle of Cowards froze with them.

Every single one. Danton’s hand stopped around his glass. Anderson’s scarred face went rigid. Zack’s composure cracked along the mouth. Aiden’s gloved hand tightened on the table’s edge. Derek’s slumped shoulders seized. Brett went pale.

Even Kyle —

Kyle couldn’t help it.

He burst out laughing.

Because he knew that voice in his bones the same way every Legacy heir in Paradise knew it — the way sailors know the sound of a storm they cannot outrun.

The only girl with enough audacity, enough sheer volcanic nerve, to shout Marcus Heavenchild’s new nickname across a packed nightclub without a flicker of fear for the consequences; something not even Danton, in all his power, in all his World Serpent inheritance, would have dared.

Maddie fucking Whitmore.

And as Kyle’s laughter spilled out across the violet-lit silence of Elysium — genuine, unstoppable, laughter born from watching someone else’s catastrophe unfold with perfect comic timing — he felt, for the first time in several weeks, something that might have been happiness.

Or at least the functional equivalent.