My Taboo Harem!

The robe was short too, barely reaching down enough to preserve modesty. Her thighs were marked with the same violence, slashes, thin bites, deeper tears where the blade-tips of the scourge had kissed and ripped away. Her calves bore smaller cuts. Her wrists were bruised beneath the restraints.

Even her feet, bare against the freezing stone, were split and wounded, the soles cut and the skin around her ankles rubbed raw by iron and movement.

Her limbs were shackled individually.

One chain held each wrist.

One each ankle.

Another around her waist.

Another around her throat.

The crystals fixed to those chains glowed in low gold pulses, feeding from her, suppressing her, or both. Around her neck sat the cruelest restraint of all: a broad collar-ring of celestial metal, polished like gold but too cold, too severe, too holy to be ordinary.

Embedded in it was a much larger crystal than the rest, and from the front and back of the collar protruded two long fang-like spikes that bit deep into the flesh of her neck.

Calling them needles would have been an insult.

Needles were delicate but these were judgment-fangs.

They did not merely pierce her skin but claimed it.

One entered from the front, just above the hollow of her throat. The other bit from behind, buried between tendon and bone with cruel precision. They were not meant to kill her. Death would have been too vulgar, too generous. They were meant to sit inside her and remind every breath that her body no longer belonged to her.

Each time she moved too sharply, each time her powers tried to stir, each time resistance even whispered through her, those things dug deeper.

Anahita drew in a slow breath again.

Pain answered from almost everywhere.

Her feet shifted slightly against the stone and another tiny wince escaped her. Even that was enough to wake the collar; the two fangs bit inward into her skin.

Her mouth opened but mo scream came out.

She had learned not to waste them.

Screams only made the cave feel useful, none of this surprised her.

She had known this was coming the moment she returned to Marcus.

And she had not been shocked to find the Lord himself out of seclusion, standing in Marcus’s suite in the Infinity Chaos Hotel alongside Eliot Heavenchild, Marcus’s father and the current Heavenchild Patriarch, waiting for her like judgment already decided.

Now here she was, hours later, according to the outside world.

Days later, if not weeks, according to her body being, punished, drained her powers but kept alive.

Her healing angelic powers restrained after they had first extracted enough of them to heal Marcus completely.

That was the insult nested inside the injury.

They had used her before they hurt her.

Anahita knew her curses as a Fallen would never work on Marcus. Not truly. He was an Angel Progenitor; what stained lesser beings slid off him like ash from polished marble. But in moments like these she still found herself hoping one day a curse would slip through.

One day the heavens would blink.

One day perhaps something dark and poetic would finally take hold of him.

Unfortunately, hope was a notoriously poor assassin.

For all his failures, Marcus had received little more than a slap on the wrist.

A reprimand, a warning and a order to get out of Infinity Chaos Hotel and return to the mansion where they all lived now.

That was it.

A boy could drag a legacy family toward public humiliation, gamble reputation, fail, rage, command, ruin, and still be sent home as if he had just spilled wine on a carpet.

Anahita could fail to prevent the impossible, fail to leash the heir who owned her soul, fail to stop Phei Ryujin Tiamat from being Phei Ryujin Tiamat, and for that she was placed inside a cave that stretched hours into days and taught metal how to bite.

That was how power explained fairness:

There was no use overthinking it. What was this, her first punishment?

Hardly.

She had stopped being shocked by the fifth time happened, years later here she was, keeping her calm and composed.

The pattern became clear enough to settle into her bones. It had turned into something almost routine: a monthly occurrence for the last five years, give or take, where she paid for the actions of a boy she could not control because he held her soul in his fist.

She could not defy him, break free or even kill herself no matter how badly she wished to.

She had tried once with poison strong enough to blacken a lesser saint’s soul.

The collar had burned it away and punished her for the attempt.

She had tried once by shattering her own heart with a Fallen curse.

The contract had dragged the curse backward into her nerves and left her conscious through the repair.

She had tried once by refusing to heal after a punishment.

The cave had healed her just enough to continue.

Even death had become another locked door.

This was her fate now.

She would never get used to pain itself. Pain remained faithful in its cruelty. But there was a miserable kind of advantage in expecting it.

To brace for the blow was still better than being ambushed by it.

And there was one small mercy hidden inside all this torture.

Time alone.

Time away from the bastard progenitor.

That, she could not buy with anything.

Too bad it never lasted.

Too bad even this tiny pocket of solitude would not save her, because if Marcus awakened fully, she would be doomed in a way far more complete than chains and whips.

Then he would have absolute control over her soul. Then even rebellion in thought might become a luxury.

Her fear of him was not simple fear.

It was the fear of being owned from the inside by that motherfucker.

The horror of knowing that one day, perhaps soon, the last private corner of herself might no longer be private. Her anger, her disgust, her will to resist, her prayers, her curses, even the secret hatred she warmed herself with during punishment—everything could be opened, read, corrected, erased.

She could survive this.

But what survived when the soul itself became a room someone else could enter whenever he wished?

Nothing.

Only obedience wearing the old face of the prisoner.

And her wishful thinking—absurd, desperate, humiliating wishful thinking—that the dragon might have some way to override Marcus’s grip on her soul?

That was not going to happen either.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat was terrifying, yes. Strange. Beautiful. Dangerous. Surrounded by impossible women and stranger shadows. His Void-Ice had ignored her essence as though her power were rain against sealed glass. His existence had tangled with threads she could not read properly.

But Marcus held her contract; the leash.

And no handsome young dragon, no matter how monstrous beneath his smile, could simply tear away a soul claim rooted in an Angel Progenitor soul.

That kind of miracle belonged in stories told to children before the world taught them contracts were stronger than prayers.

The mission Marcus had given her—to seduce Phei, infiltrate his circle, get close and useful and perhaps indispensable—would remain waiting for her when she left this cave.

If she left it before Marcus awakened.

And if she didn’t?

Then it would not matter anymore.

Her head lowered again.

The chains clinked softly.

The gold crystals pulsed against her skin.

Sigh—

A sigh echoed through the cave.

Anahita’s head lifted sharply; that had not been hers.

Her blood chilled.

The voice that followed was soft, too soft for a place like this.

"You have beautiful eyes, Fallen~"