My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 816: The "Bitch"

Beyond it, the city spread in layers of gold, blue, silver, and shadow, a luminous kingdom pretending it had never swallowed anyone whole.

The Italian stone floor caught the city’s reflection in long ribbons of light. Amber slid over pale marble and platinum trembled near the base of the windows. Deep metropolitan blue pooled in the corners like the night had spilled itself indoors and decided not to apologise.

Across a pale silver rug, charcoal sectional couches curved in a broad horseshoe, low and deep-cushioned, luxurious enough to make posture feel like a middle-class concern.

Roxanne lay on one of them.

She reclined diagonally, pillows tucked beneath her head, her body arranged in the loose surrender of a woman too exhausted to keep pretending gravity was optional. Her dark honey hair spilled over the cushions in soft disorder.

Her eyes remained half-lidded and distant, fixed on the city beyond the glass, though she was not truly looking at it. She was looking through it; past the towers, past the light, and thirty years of gilded rot, into rooms memory had locked and trauma kept breaking back into like a burglar with excellent timing.

A crystal tumbler of sweet red wine rested on the dark marble coffee table beside her.

Untouched for twenty minutes, which was tragic, because if wine could file complaints, this one would have accused her of emotional neglect. The glass caught the city lights through its faceted sides, turning the red liquid into something almost holy.

Consecrated blood for a faith no one survived; very Paradise actually.

Nights like this were the worst.

Silent, beautiful nights and saturated with amber light and the faint hum of expensive climate control, where the world looked gentle enough to trust and memory punished that foolishness immediately.

On a night like this, all Roxanne wanted was Phei’s hands.

His arms around her. His chest beneath her cheek with his warmth closing around her with that impossible steadiness that made the body believe in safety before the mind had finished arguing.

’Seventeen years old, and yet he carries a presence that makes the men of Paradise look like overdressed insects arguing over a corpse.’

The absurdity of it would have been funny if it had not saved her. A boy with the warmth of a private sun, a dragon with enough power to make reality nervous; Phei, a child by law, and yet a catastrophe by blood, and somehow the safest place she had ever known.

’Life has a sick sense of humor.’

A woman could spend decades beside a husband and learn fear from his footsteps, then find peace in the arms of someone the entire world would insist was too young to understand her pain.

’The world, as usual, should go fuck itself in a corner.’

It had never been present when the door locked and never counted the seconds between a raised voice and a raised hand.

It had no voting rights here.

She wanted Phei to tell her it was over.

Not because she did not know.

She knew; Jonathan no longer owned the future and no longer owned her; the air in her lungs or the dread in her bones.

The power that had once made him untouchable had been broken, and what remained of him belonged to consequences far older and crueler than law.

Roxanne believed it with her mind; her body was slower.

Her body still flinched when something struck the floor too loudly and tightened when a door opened too fast, for a footstep that would never again have the right to cross her threshold.

Trauma was such an incompetent tenant. Eviction notice served, locks changed, monster removed, and still it kept showing up to complain about the plumbing.

She closed her eyes.

’Will he come tonight?’

Like he had promised in the morning?

Would that strange, impossible warmth enter the room again and make the city’s lies feel small?

"Roxanne~"

The voice called her name and moved through the penthouse like a hand through water.

Soft. Warm. Intimate. That single voice reached her before thought did, passing through the amber gloom, beneath the hum of the room, straight into the place in her body where fear usually slept. It did not startle her with danger.

It startled her with relief.

Roxanne’s eyes flew open.

She sat upright too quickly, one hand still clutching the pillow that had cradled her head. The wine glass on the table trembled from the sudden movement, red ripples shivering across its surface before settling back into a saintly little silence, as if it had not just witnessed a woman’s heart attempt to escape through her ribs.

Her eyes found him.

Phei stood near the centre of the living room, framed by a portal already sealing shut behind him.

The aperture was unlike anything she had seen before.

Black-white ribbons of energy coiled within its fading circumference, spiraling through the darkness in slow, living patterns. The portal’s edges pulsed once, and the air around it shivered with cold so ancient it seemed to remember the universe before stars got arrogant and started burning.

Then the opening closed.

The chill faded a heartbeat later, retreating from the marble, the glass, the couch, the wine, and Roxanne’s skin with the disciplined grace of a beast called back to heel.

Phei stood there as if tearing open the world were a casual alternative to taking the elevator.

Because of course he did.

Paradise’s richest men built towers and named them after themselves. Phei waved his hand and made distance irrelevant: the competition was humiliating.

Someone should have informed the Patriarchs their little power games had been downgraded to children fighting over glitter glue.

But Phei was not alone.

Roxanne’s breath caught.

Standing beside him was Melissa Ryujin Tiamat.

Dark cashmere sweater. Fitted trousers. Damp hair gathered into a low knot at the nape of her neck with her posture imperial as usual. She looked freshly showered, faintly tired, and resplendent in that infuriating Ryujin Tiamat way, as though beauty had been assigned to her bloodline by divine nepotism and no one had dared question the paperwork.

Roxanne’s mouth opened.

No sound emerged.

A decade of instinct rose in her body at once.

Defend, perform or lower the eyes, but not too much. Smile if necessary, strike first if watched and bleed later.

Every old rule Jonathan had beaten into her nervous system leapt awake like trained hounds hearing a whistle; Melissa meant danger, rivalry, history, public hostility, Orchid House, forced cruelty, all those awful rooms where Roxanne had worn Jonathan’s will like a necklace made of glass.

But Melissa’s expression was wrong.

Roxanne could not read it.

That was terrifying.

She had spent years reading Melissa’s face; she knew Melissa’s disdain, her coldness, the glacial lift of her chin and the regal silence that could reduce a room of arrogant women into decorative livestock.

Roxanne had built entire survival strategies around those expressions.

This was none of them.

Melissa was not hostile, frigid or looking at Roxanne like an enemy, a rival, or a problem to be removed from an otherwise elegant evening.

There was distance in her gaze, yes. History could not be wished away like a dust Houdini.

There was caution too, and something stern enough to remind Roxanne that forgiveness, if it ever came, would not be handed over like a cheap favor at a charity auction.

But beneath all of that sat something Roxanne had no language ready for.

Something steady, terrible and almost impossible... Understanding.

Roxanne felt her throat tighten.

’No.’

That could not be right.

Understanding did not simply walk into a room after years of poison and sit down politely.

Understanding required explanations behind your actions, evidence, confession, blood, tears, perhaps a signed affidavit because wealthy families loved documentation almost as much as they loved ruining children.

Melissa could not possibly look at her and understand.

Yet she did.

Or she was trying to?

Phei’s gaze moved gently over Roxanne’s face, and for a moment, the city, the room, the wine, the glittering rot of Paradise, all of it withdrew to the edges of existence. His eyes held that warmth she had wanted only minutes ago her body recognized before her pride had time to object.

"Roxanne," he said again, softer this time.

Her fingers tightened around the pillow.

She wanted to stand and greet them properly, compose herself and become the woman she had been trained to present: polished, controlled, elegant, impossible to pity. But her body had betrayed her into stillness, and for once, perhaps, betrayal had better judgment than pride.

Melissa took one step forward but movement was small.

Roxanne’s heart still reacted like a guard dog with war trauma.

Melissa noticed.

Of course she noticed. Melissa noticed everything. She had built a wine empire from perception, silence, pride, and other people underestimating her.

Her eyes flickered briefly to Roxanne’s hand clenched around the pillow, then to the untouched wine, then to the way Roxanne’s shoulders had drawn inward before she could stop them.

Something in Melissa’s face changed.

A crack, not in her composure, but in the old story she had carried about Roxanne Montgomery.

Phei did not speak.

Merciful boy.

’Terrible boy.’

God-kissed little disaster:

For once, he allowed the women to stand inside the moment without decorating it with his mouth.

Growth, apparently, was possible. Someone should alert the heavens before they missed the miracle.

Roxanne finally found her voice, though it emerged too soft:

"Melissa."

The name carried more history than any apology could hold.

Melissa’s chin lifted by the smallest measure, her lips parted.

For one strange, suspended instant, Roxanne expected judgment: a blade she deserved and dreaded and had no strength to survive gracefully.

Instead, Melissa looked at her with those cool, bright eyes, and something like old fury moved through them, not aimed at Roxanne anymore, but toward the ghost of the man who had made both their lives uglier than they needed to be.

Then Melissa spoke:

"Hey, bitch."