My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 775: Odds Against Maxton Rulers

AN: Guys I hope you keep your eyes open and see how this one plays out... let’s go...

***

And—Cassiopeia reflected, sipping her coffee; in on a joke the entire patient ancient mansion had not yet noticed was being told at its expense—Phei had made one charming amendment to the standard viral architecture.

He had not told her exactly how the trap would close. Not all of it. He had given her enough to deliver convincingly and withheld the rest, in case the Maxton patriarchs ever decided to extract her thoroughly enough to read between her teeth.

"You don’t need to know how the trap closes, sweetheart."

"You only need to deliver the bait."

Which was precisely the sort of compliment his command voice made impossible to resent, especially when delivered while she was still shaking through the aftershocks he’d wrung out of her like pocket change.

"Moths to flame."

Yes. Repeatedly, rapturously yes. That was the essence of it all...

She set the porcelain cup down on the small antique side-table—gilded, eighteenth-century, faintly absurd—and looked around, the movement tugging the void-ice just enough to drag a soft, private little sound from her throat that no one else would ever hear.

The Maxton Ancestral Mansion was vast in the way museums were vast and patient like mausoleums.

It was wider than she remembered, even after fifty visits across years of her life... the living room alone could have swallowed three compound’s reception halls and still had space left for a string quartet, a fully stocked bar, and a quick, ruthless fuck against the far wall just to see how the ancient stone liked being christened.

The architecture was ancient and weighted the geometry of a structure built by Maxton hands in the era before the rest world had agreed on what modernity even meant. It’s coffered ceilings rose into shadow above her like the ribcage of something ancient and faintly amused by human ambition.

The walls were hewn stone faced with dark wood panelling imported, probably from a forest that no longer existed—which raised the charming question of precisely what her ancestors had done to the forest and whether they had taken their time enjoying the screams.

She used to marvel at the place each time she came here, the sheer weight of history pressing down between her shoulder blades like a dominant hand.

Now it felt almost quaint... because nothing in these stone halls could compare to the way Phei filled her, the way his voice lived in her bones, the way the construct between her thighs kept her wet and aching and perfectly, shamelessly his while she sat here pretending to be the dutiful Maxton daughter.

The mansion housed only her parents and the old goats of the Maxton ancestral lines—the first-generation patriarchs and matriarchs of the bloodline, a few of her father’s generation, those patient ancient creatures who had been wheezing through eternity long before she drew her first breath and would, cheerfully indifferent, keep right on wheezing long after she, her grandchildren, and possibly her grandchildren’s grandchildren had turned to elegant dust.

They haunted the wings like particularly well-dressed ghosts who had voted against mortality and won by unanimous senile decree.

They wandered the grounds with the slow, proprietary gait as though they believed the grass itself owed them rent while they held council in the upper chambers like a parliament that had long ago filibustered the very concept of dying and then congratulated itself on the motion.

And the mansion, vast as it was, was just enough to hold them all comfortably without anyone having to admit that the place smelled faintly of cedar, old money, and the slow, dignified decay of people who had mistaken longevity for relevance.

A few had died here and there across the centuries, of course. Their souls had toddled back to the World of Powers to await the Destined Day like cranky retirees checking into a timeshare.

But the dead souls of the Maxton ancestral line numbered a grand total of nine to less—single digits, darling—across the entire span of the family’s recorded continuity.

The Maxtons did not, as a rule, die. Dying was for other people while the Maxtons waited, with the same insufferable patience they brought to everything else, including bad wine and worse conversation.

Which was why, while recently, Cassiopeia had marvelled at the place.

She did not marvel today.

Today, sitting in the living room of the patient ancient mansion that had housed the old fossils across patient centuries, Cassiopeia felt nothing close to awe.

What she felt instead was the small, flat, deliciously dry understanding of exactly how insignificant these occupants were compared to the man they were trying cage—and she felt it with private amusement reserved for the moment one realizes one’s entire bloodline has been wrong, not about something trivial, but about every single load-bearing pillar of reality.

The kind of amusement that settled low in her belly, warm and wicked, right beside the constant, obscene pulse of the void-ice construct still seated so deep between her thighs.

’Maybe it’s my perspective that has changed in a few days.’

Maybe it had taken a rather spectacular leap the moment she had rode his cock in the penthouse and let Phei collar her soul.

Because she had seen things in the past several weeks that had recalibrated her in ways the Maxton ancestral lattice had not yet had the privilege of catching up to—nor the good sense to fear.

She had seen Phei and what he could do with a smile and a murmured command that still made her cunt clench around nothing and everything at once.

She had seen the fairy he commanded—Eira, the Void-Ice Fairy, an ancient cosmic creature whose very existence the Maxton patriarchs would have dismissed as bedtime myth had Cassiopeia been foolish enough to mention her in this morning’s report, which she had—obviously—not.

And she had seen Sienna powers.

The memory of Sienna alone was enough to make Cassiopeia’s coffee cup tremble in her hand for one small heartbeat before she steadied it with the brisk efficiency, even while her mind supplied the vivid, afterimage of claws of Sienna’s beasts, the void she ha called upon... that darkness and carnage they’d done.

’Sienna had been right.’ She feared to admit this, but Sienna had been right.

Had it not been her grandmother stopping her—patient, ancient, perhaps the single creature in this generation Sienna had ever consented to be stopped by—most of the Maxtons currently breathing in this mansion would already be dead, their souls already queuing for return flights to the World of Powers like economy passengers fighting over overhead bins.

’Or maybe turned into those frightening creature...’

The creatures Sienna had summoned had torn the witch’s barrier dome the way a bored child tears wet tissue paper.

Cassiopeia had stood at the edge and watched the dome substrate part beneath dark incomplete horrors and she had felt that nothing in the Maxton ancestral mansion was equipped to survive what Sienna could unleash upon them.

Nothing, not her father or the patient ancient first-generation patriarch snoring gravitas two floors above her, who had spent the last hundreds years convinced he was the final word on power.

Not a single one of the self-important relics this household still called formidable.

She shivered, the motion dragging the void-ice just enough to pull a soft, secret sound from her throat.

The mansion’s occupants were insignificant.

That was the new understanding she carried home with her now, like contraband lace sewn into the lining of her coat—warm, secret, and constantly brushing against her skin; the mathematics she could not stop running every time she walked these patient ancient corridors and looked at the old creatures her family still worshipped as the apex predators.

They were not the apex.

They were not even in the building where the apex was being calculated, measured, and fucked into existence.

Phei was the apex.

Sienna was the apex.