My Taboo Harem!

The words drifted through the darkness like perfume over a corpse.

Anahita did not breathe.

Every ward in the cave should have screamed.

Every chain should have tightened.

Every seal should have ignited.

There were alarms here that could detect a soul-thread slipping through the stone, formations meant to flay shadows, time-nets meant to trap teleportation, divine sensors meant to recognize intruders down to the shape of their intent.

Even thought-projections should have been shredded at the boundary.

Yet someone was inside.

Not breaking in but already in.

The silhouette stepped out at last.

It had apparently been there the entire time—watching, waiting, saying nothing while Anahita suffered beneath chains that could restrain even a True Fallen God.

The woman moved in dark heels, each click on the stone soft enough to preserve the cave’s stillness and yet somehow impossible to ignore. She came forward without hurry, the calm of her movement itself becoming sinister.

Then, not far from Anahita, she leaned against the stone wall and slowly slid down to sit upon the cold ground as though they were two women meeting by chance in a lounge rather than one broken prisoner and a nightmare wearing perfume.

In the gloom, only fragments showed clearly.

Heels with shiny black-gold bottoms.

Shantels...

Anahita’s eyes widened.

She had watched Phei, everyone around him and even watched those who watched him.

She knew people by habits, by breathing, by posture, by shoes if necessary.

And she knew exactly who wore those heels, because the owner had never been the subtle type to hide from her.

It was—

"How unfortunate, little Fallen~"

The bewitching voice soothed its way into Anahita’s ears, then around her, then under the pain itself, as though the woman’s words knew how to touch suffering without asking permission.

Anahita’s throat moved.

The collar bit deeper.

She flinched.

The woman’s gaze lowered, for the first time, the softness in the cave changed.

It did not vanish but sharpened.

"Ugly things," Lucienne murmured.

She lifted one hand.

Just a small movement of elegant fingers in the dark and then she snapped them.

The sound was tiny.

Almost delicate like a click of skin against skin.

But the cave heard it like a royal decree.

Time broke first.

Anahita saw it.

She did not understand how she saw it, but she did.

The air around the cavern fractured in transparent layers, like invisible glass cracking under pressure. The golden temporal inscriptions carved into the stone flared violently, racing across the walls in frantic patterns. Circles awakened beneath the ground. Hour-runes spun backward. Day-runes unfolded like terrified insects.

The cave’s hidden time-engine, the ancient formation that stretched hours into days and made suffering profitable, convulsed.

For a heartbeat, Anahita saw the truth of the chamber.

Not one cave.

Many.

The same cave repeated over itself in layers of time.

A cave where she had been whipped.

A cave where she had crawled.

A cave where she had passed out.

A cave where she had woken again.

A cave where the wounds had closed.

A cave where they had been opened.

A cave where she had stopped screaming.

Days stacked inside hours.

Pain stacked inside time, then Lucienne’s snap reached the center of it.

The temporal array shattered like a mirror realizing it had been reflecting the wrong face.

Gold light burst from the walls in silent streams. The spinning runes died one after another. The folded days collapsed into ordinary seconds. The cave, which had spent eras teaching time how to torture, suddenly forgot how to count.

Anahita stared with horror so complete it made her wounds feel distant.

No one broke time arrays like that.

No one.

Even gods had to negotiate with such formations, overpower them, decode them, carve through their layers, pay some price to step outside their rules.

Lucienne had snapped her fingers.

The defenses woke next.

Too late.

Stone mouths opened in the walls, revealing hidden angelic sigils. Spears of white-gold punishment light began to form in the air. Chains crawled like serpents, trying to rebind the intruder. The floor’s concentric circles lit up with celestial hostility. Ancient inscriptions screamed in a language Anahita’s bones recognized.

Lucienne did not look at them.

She only turned her head slightly.

That was all.

A glance, the defenses stopped:

The punishment spears remained half-formed, trembling in the air as though ashamed of their own existence. The chains that had lifted from the ground fell limp. The wall-sigils dimmed. The cave’s retaliatory will, crafted by Heavenchild ancestors who had clearly overestimated their importance, shrank back into the stone like a dog that had just realized the woman entering the yard was not prey.

Lucienne smiled faintly.

Then the chains around Anahita’s neck snapped.

The first break sounded like thunder trapped inside metal.

The second answered from the floor.

The third came from the ceiling.

The fourth ran through the walls.

One after another, the runic chains broke in a sequence too clean to be accident and too effortless to be battle. They did not strain against her power. They did not resist Lucienne’s command.

They simply failed, as if the law holding them together had been quietly withdrawn.

The collar split next.

The great crystal embedded in its front flickered wildly, drinking from Anahita one final desperate time before going dark.

The celestial metal cracked.

The fang in the front of her neck pulled free.

The fang behind her neck followed.

Anahita gasped:

Raw, broken, shocked by sudden space where pressure had lived for too long.

Blood welled in two dark lines where the fangs had been. The wounds began to heal at once, then stuttered, confused by the suppression still clinging to her body.

Several other chains broke in succession.

Her wrists.

Her ankles.

Her waist.

The crystals along them burst one by one, each release sounding like a small star being crushed.

Anahita scrambled backward, dragging the remnants of broken restraints with her. Her palms scraped against stone. Pain flashed through her split feet. Her wounded back struck the wall and another hiss tore from her throat.

But she barely felt it.

Her wide eyes remained fixed on Lucienne.

How monstrously powerful—

The thought did not even feel large enough.

She had never feared anything below Sovereign God rank. Never.

Her superiors could command fear from her. Certain divine old monsters could inspire caution. But this woman—

This woman had entered a sealed temporal punishment chamber without waking it.

Sat inside it while Anahita was tortured, snapped her fingers and broke its time and looked at its defenses and made them remember cowardice.

Then shattered True Fallen God restraints as though they were cheap jewelry bought from an unfortunate market stall.

Anahita’s body trembled.

The old fear of Marcus was still there.

But this was different.

Anahita was not looking at someone who might overpower her.

She was looking at someone whose existence made the existence idea of power feel provincial.

"Now, now," the woman chided gently. "That’s rude, little Fallen, no? You shouldn’t be rude to your benefactor~"

The air around her seemed to smile.

Lucienne had finally made her move.

Since the stupid angels had no idea what they truly held and had chosen to lock it in chains instead of putting a leash on their stupid boy—as that cute Ashford had once suggested—then Lucienne would simply rip the gift out of their hands.

’Spare the rod and spoil the child.’

And that brat was about to lose them such a powerhouse.

For Lucienne, who saw the strings of Fate the way other people saw rain or starlight, the value of what sat trembling before her was obvious.

Anahita was not merely a prisoner.

She was a piece, precious one, really and Lucienne, eyes fixed on grander games, knew exactly when a single piece was worth overturning the board.

It was time.

Time to make her move.

Time to claim her present.

A present that would decide how successful she would be in the great, beautiful, terrifying scheme she had only just begun to unfold.