My Taboo Harem!

Hell’s Paradise had stolen enough light from the earth to survive without the heavens.

From behind the floor-to-ceiling glass of Infinity Chaos Hotel, Maya watched the city blaze beneath a dark sky where neither moon nor star remained. Heavy clouds had swallowed everything above the island, leaving Paradise beneath a vast black ceiling that somehow made the city more beautiful for it.

Towers rose in silver, amber and white, thousands upon thousands of windows burning defiantly through the darkness, while roads wound between them in glowing rivers of headlights. Hell’s Paradise Lake held pieces of that brilliance upon its black surface, breaking entire skyscrapers into trembling pillars of gold whenever the wind disturbed the water.

Beyond it all, the Endless Forest surrounded civilization in an enormous darkness of its own, broken here and there by distant estates whose lights seemed impossibly small from this height.

It was beautiful enough to make Maya ache at the beauty of it that she wasn’t sure would survive what was approaching but hoped it would.

She had always preferred cities from much higher up:

Very, very high, where towers finally stopped pretending they were tall, highways became glowing veins and entire districts could disappear beneath the spread of one hand.

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So did the ugliness, the borders and all the terribly important little divisions humans spent their lives drawing between one another. From high enough above, a city became little more than a constellation laid across the earth.

Cities were prettier from up there.

Maya missed that view more often than she liked admitting.

Down here, she only truly enjoyed watching one when Grandma stood beside her or if Phei was close enough to make the city itself secondary. Grandma could make almost anywhere feel removed from the ordinary world, and Phei had the far less dignified talent of ruining Maya’s concentration simply by existing nearby.

Tonight she had neither.

Maya placed her fingertips against the cool glass and sighed. "What a mess."

The city had nothing to do with it.

Her pale gaze moved lazily across Paradise, and seven hidden presences immediately burned inside her perception.

One waited on the rooftop of a tower northeast of Infinity Chaos Hotel, crouched beneath a maintenance structure with his aura folded so tightly that most cultivators could have walked directly beneath him without ever looking up. Another occupied the darkness beneath an unfinished skybridge.

Two more had positioned themselves close to the waterfront, while the remaining three were buried among service buildings, underground structures and neighboring towers surrounding the hotel from separate directions.

Seven shadows.

Seven men watching Phei’s home.

To anyone else, their concealment was excellent.

To Maya, they might as well have climbed onto their rooftops carrying enormous torches and waving politely in her direction.

She could see their breathing, the weapons hidden beneath ordinary clothes, the concealment treasures pressed against their bodies and every faint disturbance produced when their attention shifted toward Infinity Chaos Hotel.

More importantly, she could see what all that discipline was trying to hide:

Intent.

It was so patient to last weeks, ugly and waiting.

Inside the hotel, life continued without the faintest awareness that seven killers had wrapped themselves around the building. Elevators climbed between floors. Wineglasses touched over dinner. Staff pushed carts through immaculate corridors, someone complained about room service several levels below, and somewhere else a woman laughed loudly enough for Maya to hear through walls that should have swallowed the sound.

Outside, seven men waited for permission to turn an ordinary night into something Phei might remember for the rest of his life.

Danton had finally begun.

Maya’s expression lost what little softness remained in it.

She did not believe he would succeed completely:

Phei had an irritating habit of destroying carefully prepared plans simply by arriving where nobody expected him, and too many unpredictable people still surrounded him for Danton to control every possibility:

Eira might uncover something he had missed, Sienna could interfere through places where everyone else had too little room to move, Selene could appear somewhere Danton had never accounted for and make his entire strategy regret being born.

But Danton did not need everything.

He only needed enough.

One woman taken before Phei reached her.

One injury that could not be undone quickly enough.

One person he loved lying somewhere he had arrived a minute too late to protect.

Maya knew him well enough to understand what would follow.

Phei would hunt whoever had done it until he found them, and once he did, Legacy blood would mean nothing and that ancient warning to never kill a Legacy would mean absolute shit.

He would kill them.

Worse, if someone stronger stood before him and declared that he was forbidden to do so, Phei would eventually turn his anger toward that person too.

That was where tonight and the weeks to follow could become much larger than Danton intended.

Maya’s fingers curled slightly against the glass. "A mess indeed."

The cruelest part was how easily she could prevent it.

Seven shadows scattered around the hotel were hardly pests:

Maya could erase every one of them before the first understood he had been discovered, and she would not need to leave this room to accomplish it, Phei’s grandma could do the same, the Monster could do far worse, Eira carried strength Earth had no business allowing to breathe freely, and the hidden powerhouses of the Ryujin Tiamats could descend upon Paradise and turn the entire two legacy families into a very brief lesson of poor judgment.

’That strength is precisely the problem.’

Earth was watched.

Above the religions mortals understood and beyond the heavens their prayers reached, Gods governed the boundaries of this world. Their authority had been woven through Earth’s Laws and through the greater Laws surrounding the universe itself.

So the beings who stood too far beyond what this realm permitted could not simply descend, reveal their true strength and crush every problem that inconvenienced them.

Cross the wrong boundary and Divine Wrath would answer.

The Laws did not care whether the reason had been righteous.

Maya hated that lesson more each time she was forced to remember it.

"There is something uniquely cruel about possessing more than enough power to stop a disaster while being forced to watch it approach because using that power recklessly might summon something far worse."

Strength ceased to matter once the consequences of releasing it became larger than the danger one hoped to prevent.

She had already tasted that helplessness enough.

At the Ashford Estate, when Phei collided with that stupid Immortal, she had watched the situation scrape against powers that could no longer move freely without inviting attention from above.

She remembered knowing how easily certain people there could have ended the conflict and how dangerous that easy answer had become.

Then there had been Brett.

The memory hardened Maya’s eyes immediately.

Brett had tricked Phei and nearly cost him his life. Maya had known enough to understand where the situation was heading, yet once again she had been unable to simply descend and erase every Legacy bastard involved. Instead, she had been forced to rely upon Sienna’s strange little tricks to stretch those final moments, bending what could still be bent without openly tearing against the Laws until Maya could finally reach him using stupid cars and the facade of a team, Sierra and Maddie.

Even Sienna’s methods had limits.

"Everything here seems to have limits."

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