My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 972: [Text:] Sleep Well Noah

By the time the anchor left the cliff mansion, the night had become too quiet.

Not peaceful but quiet.

There was a difference, and every man with enough sins behind him eventually learned it, usually at the worst possible hour, when fate had already locked the door and thrown the key somewhere deep beneath the floorboards where the rot lived.

Peace allowed a person to breathe without hearing the weight of what he had done sitting beside him like an unpaid debt.

This silence was colder:

The hush waited behind the expensive gate in polished mirrors:

It was the silence of something watching from a place the eye refused to check twice—something that had already decided the ending and was simply savoring the walk to the door.

The anchor stepped out through the side entrance, his coat buttoned high against the chill, his face still carrying the disciplined calm he had spent years building.

He had survived difficult interviews before and he knew how to sit beneath lights, tilt his head, ask the right poisonous question, and let someone else bleed.

Tonight, had been different.

Tonight, the boy had bled no one.

He had opened the room and let the world see where the corpses had always been buried.

And something in the dark had liked the sound of that.

The anchor’s fingers tightened around his phone as he walked toward the waiting car. His driver stood beside the open door, silent and expressionless.

The anchor did not look back at the mansion.

He could not.

The cliff mansion, with all its glass, velvet light, and panoramic arrogance, now felt less like a filming location and more like a courtroom where the judge had smiled beautifully before sentencing everyone.

Behind him, far above the roofline, something moved:

A shadow that was thing and tall:

Almost human.

It leaked—sliding from one patch of darkness into another like oil spreading across water, silent and inevitable. The anchor did not see it nor did anyone.

The anchor entered the car and the door closed.

For one brief second, reflected in the darkened window, a silhouette stood behind him.

Too close. Too still. The outline of a head tilted at an angle no living neck should allow.

He blinked.

His own tired face looked back, nothing behind it but empty leather and dim glass.

He told himself it had been the headlights of a turning car.

But were there any turning cars?

Then the car moved, and the reflection vanished.

Inside, the anchor exhaled slowly and rubbed his forehead. His phone had not stopped vibrating since the broadcast ended. Messages from executives, missed calls from producers, legal warnings and threats dressed as concern from the high-ups.

One message from an unknown number contained only three words.

You failed!

He deleted it.

A stupid reaction; a childish one.

Deleting a message never deleted the person behind it, but everyone loved pressing buttons and pretending existence had obeyed. Noah leaned back and closed his eyes as the car left the mansion road and entered the descending stretch toward the lower side of the island.

The city lights unfolded ahead, scattered and distant.

Behind the car, shadows followed.

Not one but several.

They moved along rooftops following him: roadside trees, the backs of signs, and the brief black hollows between streetlights.

One glided across the surface of a passing billboard and vanished into the mouth of an alley like smoke being inhaled. Another stretched along the limousine’s rear window, too thin to be natural, too still to be reflection, its outline pressing against the glass as though testing how much pressure it would take to come through. A third crouched beneath a streetlamp, sitting in the full spill of light and giving the ground nothing, as though the world had quietly stopped keeping records of it.

The anchor saw none of them.

He only felt colder.

He adjusted the car’s temperature and frowned when the warm air brushed his face without touching the chill lodged beneath his skin.

It was deeper than skin. It lived in the marrow.

"Everything alright, sir?" the driver asked.

"Yes," the anchor said too quickly.

Then, after a pause, "Just drive."

"Yes, sir."

The driver said nothing else:

Professional men survived by understanding which silences were not theirs to fill.

The car passed through the wealthy districts, through gates that opened before the driver even slowed. The anchor lived on the quieter side of Hell’s Paradise Island. His own home stood at the end of a curved private lane: a beautiful three-storey mansion spread wide beneath the moon, pale stone walls, tall glass windows, dark balconies, gardens arranged with almost insulting perfection.

It told visitors its owner had money, taste, and a carefully managed public image.

Tonight, it looked like a mausoleum pretending to be real estate.

But it felt like the place already knew how the funeral would look.

The car rolled through the gate.

The mansion lights were on in warm gold that spilled from the windows. The fountain near the entrance whispered softly into its marble basin.

Everything was familiar, orderly, safe.

Above the third floor, a shadow rested against the roofline, patient as a vulture that had already chosen its meal. Another stood among the cypress trees, long and narrow, its head tilted toward the arriving car with the idle curiosity of something that had never needed to hurry. A third clung beneath the balcony outside the master bedroom window, folded upside down like a stain the moon refused to explain, its limbs too long, its stillness too complete.

The anchor stepped out of the car.

He looked at his house and forced himself to breathe.

’Home.’

That word should have meant something.

His wife had taken the children to her mother’s estate for the week, which had felt convenient yesterday and now felt like either mercy or design. The house staff had been dismissed early; he had wanted silence after the broadcast, space to think, room to decide which side of the disaster still had a place for him.

Marcus had used him, yes.

But he had agreed to be used.

There was no innocence in that; only price and the trouble with selling your soul to powerful heirs was that the receipt never expired.

But there was only emptiness where regret of the deal he’d made would’ve been; this was not his first time and it was the only reason he’d moved beyond his peers to be where he was now and afford any of this and provide for his family.

What was there to regret about?

His shoes clicked against the stone path as he walked toward the front door.

Behind him, near the fountain, the water changed.

Not visibly but only the reflection trembled, and within it, dark silhouettes gathered around the house like mourners arriving early for a funeral that had already been scheduled. One at the roof. One near the trees. One by the balcony. One behind him in the fountain’s surface, too close to his own reflection, its face a blank smear of black that seemed to be smiling without a mouth.

Noah paused feeling hair stand at the back of his neck.

Slowly, he turned but there was nothing there.

Only the car.

The expensive night, holding very still, the way a room holds still when everyone in it has agreed not to tell you something.

The silence itself felt attentive.

"Sir?" the driver asked.

The anchor swallowed. "Wait until I’m inside."

"Yes, sir."

Noah hated how thin his own voice sounded.

He hated, even more, that he could not name what frightened him. No footsteps. No attacker. No weapon. Just the certainty that something had followed him home, and that it had not hurried because it already knew the ending.

He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and shut it behind him.

The lock clicked.

Outside, the driver returned to the car.

On the roof, the shadow lifted its head. Slowly. Almost politely. As though acknowledging that the guest of honor had finally arrived.

Inside, the anchor stood in the foyer without moving.

His home smelled faintly of polished wood, candles, and the lilies his wife liked in the entrance hall. He placed his keys into the silver tray beside the door.

The sound was small.

Delicate.

Absurdly normal.

His phone vibrated again.

He looked down.

Unknown number.

One message.

Now you pay

The anchor’s throat tightened.

A threat told you what was coming.

This told you only that it had been decided, scheduled somewhere above him, and that the gap between now and then existed purely so he could spend it understanding.

A noise came from upstairs.

Soft.

Almost polite.

A footstep that had paused to choose manners. Then another. Slow. Deliberate. As if the thing making them wanted him to hear every single one.

He looked toward the staircase.

"Hello?"

His voice rose into the house and came back smaller.

No answer.

Only the soft creak of weight settling onto the second-floor landing.

Outside, one by one, the garden lights flickered in sequence, from the gate toward the door, as though something walked the path and switched them off behind itself.

His phone vibrated one last time.

The anchor looked down despite himself.

Sleep well Noah.

For several seconds he could not move, understanding at last, with the clean and useless clarity that arrives only after it can save no one, that he had not been followed home to be questioned or warned.

He had been escorted:

Walked to the door of his own life so the thing now in his house would not have to come find him in the cold: -

Then every light in the mansion went out.

The dark arrived all at once, complete—thick, wet, and heavy, as though the house itself had exhaled and chosen not to breathe again.

Outside, the silhouettes gathered closer beneath the moon and no longer bothered to hide, because there was no one left to deceive.

The anchor stood alone in the dark, listening to his own breathing.

And to the second, slower breathing that had begun somewhere to his left:

Unhurried and content...

...Settling in and taking ownership of the space the way a predator claims a den.

And above him, from the second floor, something softly laughed.

The sound was almost gentle; almost fond.