My Taboo Harem System

Chapter 136: Deal

The night was quiet.

Denzel lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, fully dressed.

He hadn’t even bothered pulling the sheets up.

Dinner had been easy enough — him, Sophia, Maria, bowls passed around, conversation light and forgettable, the kind that fills a room without demanding anything from you. Then they’d scattered. Goodnights exchanged. Doors closed. The apartment settling into the particular silence of people who lived together but slept separately.

He’d waited.

An hour. Maybe more. Long enough for breathing to slow on the other side of the walls, for the floorboards to stop talking. He lay still with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes open, watching the ceiling like it owed him something.

Then — there.

A soft creak. One. Just the single complaint of a floorboard adjusting under careful weight, and then silence reclaiming the hallway immediately after, as though ashamed of the noise.

Then footsteps. Faint. Deliberate.

Then the front door — barely a sound. More of a suggestion. The soft mechanical exhale of a latch disengaging.

Denzel was already moving.

He crossed to his window and looked down.

Sophia.

The moonlight caught her as she paused on the pavement below — head turning, one slow sweep left, then right, scanning the street with the practiced calm of someone who’d done this before. She held still for two full seconds. Then she moved, slipping into the shadow at the edge of the road and continuing without looking back.

Denzel watched her go.

’There she is.’

He’d told himself he was going to follow her today. He hadn’t been joking when he’d thought it. He wasn’t joking now.

He gave her thirty seconds. Then he opened the front door, eased it shut behind him, and stepped out into the night.

~~~

She was good.

He’d give her that.

She moved like someone who understood streets — not just walking them, but using them. She stayed close to walls. She took the long route around lit intersections. When a car rolled past she paused in a doorway without breaking stride, the pause built into her movement so naturally it looked like nothing.

Denzel stayed half a block back. Far enough to be shadow. Close enough that the sound of her footsteps stayed in range.

Left on Crest. Right on the narrow lane behind the laundry. Straight through the underpass where the lights had been broken for months.

He kept pace. Easy. Patient.

Then she turned the corner at the end of Weller Street.

He counted four seconds and followed.

Nothing.

He stopped.

The alley ahead was empty. A skip. A drainpipe. A cat that glanced at him with complete indifference and looked away. The far end of the alley opened onto a wider road — he could see the orange glow of a streetlamp, the distant shape of a parked van.

No Sophia.

He moved forward anyway, quickly now, and reached the far end. Looked both ways down the road.

Empty.

He turned back. Checked the alley again. Checked the walls, the fire escape above, the skip — lid closed, undisturbed.

’She didn’t run,’ he thought. ’I would have heard that.’

He stood very still and listened.

Nothing. Not even footsteps fading. Just the city doing its usual thing, indifferent and ongoing, as though Sophia had simply ceased to exist somewhere between one step and the next.

"What the —" he caught himself, pressing his back against the alley wall, jaw tightening.

He’d had eyes on her. He’d been careful. The gap hadn’t been more than four seconds — four — and she was gone like smoke, like she’d stepped sideways out of the world entirely.

’Did she make me?’ he thought. ’No. She didn’t speed up. She didn’t check behind her after the underpass.’

He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand.

’Then what? She just — vanished?’

He pushed off the wall and moved back through the alley slowly, retracing the route with his eyes this time rather than his feet, looking for anything he’d missed. A door. A gap between buildings. A hatch.

Nothing obvious.

’Does she have an invisibility ability?’ The thought arrived flat, without drama, because in a world where Denzel himself could make his body explode with concentrated force on command, it wasn’t even the strangest thing he’d considered this week. ’Or something like it. Concealment. Suppressed presence. Something.’

He stopped walking.

Stood there in the middle of the empty alley with his arms crossed, staring at the ground, working through it.

She was a colleague. She worked the same shifts. She smiled at the right moments and said the right things and had never once given him a reason to look twice —

Except now she was slipping out of apartments at midnight and disappearing into alleys like a ghost.

He exhaled through his nose.

Then something shifted at the back of his mind. Slow. The beginning of a thought rather than the thought itself — the shape of an idea taking form before the details filled in.

He paused.

His eyes lifted.

The forest was still waking up.

Morning light came through the canopy in thin, broken columns — the kind that moved when the wind touched the branches, shifting gold across the undergrowth in slow, lazy patterns. Birds were going at it already, the overlapping chatter of things that had no problems and wanted everyone to know. Somewhere deeper in, something rustled through dead leaves and went quiet.

The knight was seated at the base of a broad tree, legs crossed, hands resting open on her knees. Her eyes were closed. She was humming — low, rhythmic, the same four-bar phrase cycling back on itself over and over, unhurried, like someone with nowhere to be and no opinion about it.

The birds filled in around it.

She heard him before she saw him. The footsteps were deliberate — not sneaking, not announcing. Just walking. She let one eye open.

Denzel had stopped a few metres away. Same spot as yesterday, near enough. He had his hands in his pockets and the expression of someone who had arrived at a decision they weren’t entirely happy about.

Her smile came easy.

"I told you," she said. "I told you that you’d come."

"Hold on." He held up a hand. "Before anything — if I’m doing this, I need three things from you."

She tilted her head. "And what are they?"

He didn’t rush it.

"First — what happens if I enter the academy and I sit the exam and I can’t pass? What does that look like for me?"

"Second —" he shifted his weight slightly — "if you’re expecting me to trust you enough to follow you into whatever this is, I need to know your ability. Not a summary. Not a vague description. Your actual ability."

The knight ’s expression didn’t move.

"And the third?"

"There’s someone I need followed. Someone I can’t track myself — I lost her last night and I need to know where she goes and what she’s doing. That’s on you. You do that for me, or I’m not going anywhere."

He said it clean. No decoration. Like he was reading from a list he’d written in his head somewhere around three in the morning and had spent the rest of the night memorising.

The knight looked at him for a long moment.

Then she uncrossed her legs and stood, brushing a leaf from her knee with one unhurried hand.

"Drop the act," she said pleasantly. "Those aren’t three things you want, Denzel. Those are three things you need. There’s a difference." She dusted her palms together. "You didn’t come here to negotiate. You came here because you’ve already decided."

He said nothing.

"But —" she exhaled, tilting her face briefly toward the canopy above like she was considering something generous — "since you have been so remarkably sweet to me. Such a gentleman. Truly." The corner of her mouth pulled. "I’ll do one. One out of your three little requests. If that’s not enough for you, then you know where the road back is."

"One," he repeated.

"One."

He looked at her. She looked back, smile sitting easy on her face, giving nothing away.

He grunted.

"The third one. I need time to follow someone."

Something in her posture settled — small, barely visible, like a thread going slack.

"That," she said, "won’t be a problem." She brought her hands together in a single quiet clap, the sound absorbed immediately by the trees around them. "So. Do we have a deal?"

Denzel held the silence for one more second.

"Yeah," he said. "We have a deal."