My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 954: Marcus’s Scapegoat: The Foolish Loyal Servant

The moon was at its peak, pouring everything it had over Hell’s Paradise Island as though the night itself had climbed to a throne and demanded tribute. It hung there with its pale celestial presence, watching the world below in cold silence, judging perhaps, or perhaps relishing the useless struggles of the humans crawling beneath it.

With the moon, one could never truly know.

It had that ancient, silver-faced arrogance of things that had watched empires rise, lovers betray each other, kings rot, families slaughter their own blood, and still returned every night looking innocent.

A very suspicious rock, if one was being honest.

Hidden within the selenic stillness of her own creation, augmented by reflected shadows and veils of borrowed moonlight, Anahita bit her lip hard enough that a mortal mouth would have split open.

It was only thanks to her powerful body that her sweet cherry-colored lips survived the torture without blood blooming over them. Her face remained beautiful beneath the moon, beautiful in that lonesome, fallen-star way certain doomed creatures possessed when heaven had already abandoned them but beauty, that foolish loyal servant, had refused to leave.

The truth settled in her chest with cold, merciless simplicity: she was dead.

Not metaphorically dead, or theatrically the way dramatic women declared themselves finished after embarrassment, heartbreak or bad lighting.

This was worse. Much worse.

Although the decision to bribe the journalist in a desperate attempt to humiliate Phei on live television had not been hers, the responsibility of seeing that plan succeed had somehow fallen into her lap, because apparently being useful in powerful households meant becoming the official basket where everyone dropped their stupidity before setting it on fire.

Of course, the responsibility had always been metaphorical at first.

What was she supposed to do, exactly? Leap onto the stage and physically stop Phei from answering questions too beautifully? Shove truth back into his mouth? Smother evidence with her wings? Tell the broadcast cameras politely to stop recording reality because Marcus Heavenchild’s ego was feeling fragile?

Unfortunately, tonight the metaphor had ended.

Marcus would not care that she could not have controlled Phei neither would the bastard care that the evidence had appeared like divine judgment wearing high-definition formatting.

Marcus would take his own failure, sharpen it, and carve it into her skin because that was what masters did when their own stupidity needed somewhere softer to land.

Anahita had tried. She truly had.

She had whispered what Marcus wanted to be said live into the journalist’s ear, guiding him toward questions about Phei’s relationships, his women, his family, his origins, even fabricating unreal rumors to discredit his dead parents and even blame the accident on Phei, anything that could bruise him publicly and drag his composure into the mud.

The fabricated rumors about his parents, the ugly little inventions were about what they had done before they died, the kind of stories that smelled of old malice and new desperation.

Yet each time the question reached Phei, the Young Dragon moved around it as though he had seen the blade days ago and grown bored waiting for it to arrive.

Every attack aimed at his women slid uselessly aside.

Every trap aimed at his family collapsed before it could close. Every rumor about his parents died so completely in his answer that the lie did not even have the dignity of a dramatic death; it simply stopped breathing in front of everyone.

What truly unsettled her, though, in the small cold place behind her terror, was that Phei had not merely deflected those particular rumors:

He had gone quiet around them, just for a heartbeat, the same brief stillness a wounded thing keeps around the part of itself still healing. The lies about his parents had not bounced off him because they were beneath him. They had bounced off him because he already knew something truer and worse underneath them, and was guarding it. Anahita filed that away without knowing why. Fallen things hoarded secrets the way mortals hoarded coins, on the off chance one might someday buy a door.

Anahita trembled, her body shaking as though it could already feel the hell waiting for her after this night, as though punishment had sent its shadow ahead to touch her bones early.

What was worse, failing the mission, or the way the failure had turned catastrophic enough to swallow not only Marcus but the entire Heavenchild name with him? Were those two things even mutually exclusive?

Was that the phrase? Mutually exclusive?

She was not particularly familiar with that English analogy, and honestly, now seemed like a poor time to improve her vocabulary.

Either way, she was fucked sideways, diagonally, spiritually and probably in several old languages no one had spoken since fallen angels still received decent employment terms.

To make it even worse, Lord and Master Elliot had specifically told her to stop aiding Marcus’s plans.

And what had she done?

She had aided Marcus’s plan.

Magnificent. Truly a career-defining collapse:

If failure had a palace, she had just walked inside, redecorated, hired staff, polished the windows and declared herself queen.

But what choice did the fallen angel even have? Part of her soul was tied to that bastard, bound through a contract that lived deeper than obedience and uglier than loyalty

Only another soul contract, another mark and claim powerful enough to overwrite the first could free her.

Anahita could promise Elliot she would never aid Marcus again. She could mean it with every shred of her broken, winged existence:

But Marcus remained her master in a way that made refusal almost impossible unless the order crossed certain absolute boundaries:

If Marcus told her to end her own life, perhaps the bond would strain differently. Anything short of that, however, and she was at his mercy.

’Turns out I will be receiving two punishments today.’

The thought passed through her mind with such bleak dryness that she nearly laughed.

Marcus would punish her first. He would blame her for the plan’s failure, for the interview turning into a public execution, for the evidence tearing through the Heavenchild reputation, for the family’s stocks already falling across almost every business they owned.

That was not some cute little market stumble either.

The Heavenchilds did not own a few companies and a charming yacht. Their holdings touched nearly sixty percent of Earth’s economic arteries, directly or indirectly, because apparently normal domination had been too modest for them and they had chosen financial suffocation as a family hobby.

Then, after Marcus, Elliot and the Lord would punish her too

Lord and Master Elliot would look at her with that colder, older disappointment and punish her for not stopping their stupid child and unawakened Progenitor from dragging the entire house down with him in one tantrum-shaped plan.

As if Marcus was a kid who can’t fully comprehend what the consequences of his actions would be.

She could almost hear the question already. Why did you not restrain him? Why did you not refuse? Why did you let him proceed? As though she were babysitting a five-year-old with apocalyptic inheritance and a leash made of political influence.

’Why did they release the stupid dog off its leash just as it is about to awaken and then blame me when it bit the world?’

That was only one of the many questions Anahita would never be allowed to ask.

She had plenty of those, really. A whole gallery and possibly a museum with guided tours and depressing lighting.

She had even tried to ruin the screens.

That had been the most humiliating part.

When the Void-Ice walls began showing evidence, Anahita had pushed her essence toward them, attempting to blur the images, fracture the display, corrupt the reflections, do something, anything, that might prevent the broadcast from becoming a funeral service for two legacy families.

Instead, her power had brushed against the crystalline darkness and slid off like rain against sealed glass.

She had stared with wide eyes as her essence failed to sink into the surface or even do much as scratch it; she’d even failed even to offend it and they’d had ignored her with such absolute indifference that she almost felt personally insulted.

Being defeated or being treated as trash by some stupid boy was one thing but being disregarded by architecture was simply rude.

And there had been a moment, brief and awful, when the cold radiating off that Void-Ice had felt less like a substance and more like attention, as though something vast had glanced through the crystal at the small fallen thing scratching at its window and decided she was not worth the courtesy of a reaction.

She had not stopped thinking since.

Whatever Dragon was, the rumors had undersold him, and the people who had sent her here to inconvenience him had no idea what they had actually poked.

’Whatever.’

It was not her first time in the punishment department, and it would not be her tenth either. Given how badly everything was collapsing for the Heavenchilds while the Ashfords would soon rise higher above them, she would undoubtedly receive one of the heaviest punishments available.

Perhaps something creative than the Cave of End.

Powerful families did love creativity when applied to suffering.

Still, it was all fine. Or not fine, exactly, but inevitable, which was the miserable older cousin of fine and often the only thing fate allowed lesser beings to hold.