My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 961: Lonely Fallen Star: Last Taste of Freedom

Like a lonely star fleeing the judgment of heaven, she flew.

Upward through the chilling cold of the night, her figure carving a luminous wound across the darkness as Hell’s Paradise Island shrank beneath her into scattered lights, black forests and moon-silver cliffs.

One of her enormous wings shone white, pure and radiant, its feathers carrying a soft golden undertone as though some remnant of heaven still refused to leave her body despite every contract, every fall and every master who had ever dragged her name through obedience.

The other wing burned with a brilliant darkness, not dull or corrupted in the ugly way everyone imagined fallen things, but resplendent in its own terrible manner, black light spilling from it like midnight had learned how to gleam.

Together they made her look holy, unholy divine and condemned.

A bewitching contradiction of gold, white and shadow fleeing through the moonlit sky.

She flapped both wings once.

The motion was enormous and majestic, a single sovereign beat that tore through the sharp winds and hurled her higher with the force of a shining missile wrapped in sorrow; space and time tore in a majestically big shape of her as she broke through eating distance.

White-gold radiance and dark brilliance split apart behind her in three distinct streams of afterimage, each color lingering for a breath in the sky before dissolving into the cold.

She moved so fast the air itself seemed late to understand she had already passed, and the winds bowed in her wake, bending around her flight like servants frightened of offending a Fallen already sentenced for crimes someone else had designed.

Even space appeared to tremble faintly around her speed, the night stretching and shivering as though reality had been cut by something too beautiful to call a weapon and too tragic to call free.

Hidden by the brutal speed and the flaying wind was Anahita’s face.

Mournful; angelic and moonlit.

Her beauty was not loud in that moment but lonesome and delicate, the sorrowful elegance that made beauty feel less like a gift and more like an accusation.

Her small sweet-looking pink lips were pressed together, still faintly bruised from how hard she had bitten them earlier, and her eyes carried the dull ache; she was not flying toward rescue but toward punishment. She was not escaping.

That was the cruelest joke of all but she was taking the longest route back to the cage because the cage had called her name, and the chain inside her soul had answered before her pride could pretend otherwise.

Behind her, Eira kept up easily.

The fairy glided in the wake of the Fallen Angel’s terrifying speed without flapping her wings, floating through the currents as though the night itself had decided she weighed less than intention.

Her small body darted through the air with impossible ease, lollipop still held between her lips because apparently even secret pursuit missions needed refreshments.

Truly, if anyone ever wrote a serious manual on divine reconnaissance, Eira would ruin the dignity of the entire field by appearing in the illustrations with a candy.

Still, the usual bright mischief in her eyes had faded.

She watched Anahita ahead of her; the way the Fallen Angel flew with such desperate grace, and could not stop the faint sadness that moved through her.

Eira did not pity Anahita, not exactly. Pity was too clean a word, too generous, and Anahita was not innocent; she had served Marcus and she had helped whisper traps into the journalist’s ear. She had stood on the wrong side of the night, even if the wrong side had been tied around her soul before she could choose differently.

But sadness was different from pity. Sadness could look at guilt and still understand suffering.

Sadness could recognize a prisoner even when the prisoner had helped hold someone else’s chains.

"She knows," Eira whispered to herself, eyes narrowing faintly as Anahita climbed higher.

"She knows what is waiting."

Marcus had called her back.

Not summoned politely, not even the respect of requesting her presence like some civilized employer with manners, a salary structure and basic decency.

He had called her back, the way masters called what belonged to them, and Anahita had obeyed because part of her soul was bound to him.

Somewhere, no doubt, the Angel Progenitor had been watching the interview too, expecting to see Phei fall beneath public humiliation only for the entire plan to blow up in Marcus’s face so violently that even Hell’s Paradise’s night might still be coughing smoke.

Now Anahita had been called to receive punishment for failures that had not truly been hers, before later facing the two leaders of the Heavenchild family; apparently one executioner had not been enough and rich families had always loved scheduling suffering in layers.

Eira’s fingers tightened slightly around the stick of her lollipop.

Anahita did not need to report. There was nothing left to report. Everyone had seen the catastrophe.

Marcus had seen it, the Heavenchild elders had seen it, the world had seen it, and the stocks of Heavenchild businesses were probably still falling with the enthusiasm of bodies dropped from tall buildings.

But punishment did not require usefulness and only required someone powerful to be angry and someone weaker to be available.

"She’s taking her last freedom flight," Eira murmured.

The words left her quietly, and the moment they did, she understood why the sight hurt.

Anahita was flying as though she wanted to memorize the wind before it was taken from her. The cold night wrapped around her, the moon poured silver over her wings, and the heavens opened wide enough to make even a doomed fallen thing look free.

But there was no freedom in her destination.

Only a temporary illusion in the sky, a final stretch of beauty before obedience dragged her downward again.

Who knew when she would next have the luxury to fly like this, held by wind, night and moonlight instead of chains, orders and punishment?

Who knew when she would again feel the open sky beneath her wings without someone waiting below to remind her that even angels could be owned?

Eira knew that feeling too well.

Once, long ago, she had taken a last flight of her own:

’Each time before the Eternal Prisons.’

The memory came softly, which made it worse.

She remembered the sky then, the great and terrible expanse of it, the way freedom had looked more beautiful because she knew she was about to lose it. She remembered flying not because she could escape, but because she wanted one final taste of height before stone, chains and punishment swallowed her name.

But unlike Anahita, Eira had actually done what she had been accused of.

That did not make the prison kinder; it only made the guilt easier for others to carry on her behalf, which was one of those moral conveniences people loved until they were the ones screaming in the dark.

And there, drifting in the freezing wake of a stranger’s sorrow, Eira felt the old ache she kept folded away behind sugar and mischief. She had been small for a long time now, small and sweet and easy to underestimate, and she had built that smallness on purpose, brick by brick, because the alternative was being seen clearly by things that hunted what they saw.

Watching Anahita fly toward her cage, Eira remembered exactly why she had chosen Phei, why she had attached her ancient, scarred little heart to a boy the world had once stepped over. He was the one being she had ever met who, given chains and a prisoner, reached for the prisoner. That was rarer than any bloodline.

That was the only thing she had ever found worth following out of a prison and back into a dangerous world.

Anahita had not even done what they blamed her for.

Her crime was simpler.

Crueler.

’Her soul belongs to Marcus.’

That was all Anahita had done.

Eira could feel pieces of what Anahita carried even from this distance: sadness, loneliness, mourning, sorrow, grief, fear and that heavy, exhausted despair that came when a person no longer expected mercy but still had enough hope left to suffer from its absence.

The Fallen Angel’s emotions trailed behind her like torn ribbons of black silk, beautiful only because distance made pain look poetic, and Eira hated that too. Suffering should not have been allowed to look beautiful.

’It encourages idiots to romanticize it, and the world already has too many poets and not enough rescue plans.’

"Quietly lonely, isn’t she?"

The soft voice whispered beside Eira.

Eira’s entire body jolted.

The lollipop nearly slipped from her mouth, and her wings flared instinctively as she stopped mid-flight so abruptly that the air around her folded and snapped. For one frozen breath she hovered in the cold sky, eyes wide, heart lurching with an old primal alarm that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with hierarchy. Where she had just flown, where there had been nothing, where her senses had sworn there was nothing, Lucienne now floated beside her as though she had been there all along and reality had simply forgotten to inform anyone with survival instincts.

The Monster.