My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 774: Moths

Things had started escalating faster than most had anticipated the moment Phei stepped onto Hell’s Paradise Island, and the universe—fickle, gleeful, and chronically under-occupied—had slammed the fast-forward button with the gleeful abandon like child who’d just discovered the remote could make the whole damn show go full-tilt filthy.

"Like moth drawn to the flames," Cassiopeia murmured into the porcelain rim of her coffee cup, the words curling on her tongue like smoke and immediately revealing themselves to be wrong in three distinct, deliciously humiliating directions at once.

She frowned at her own mouth, the tiny crease between her brows doing nothing to mask how her lips still felt plush and bee-stung from the memory of his.

That wasn’t the right way to use it, was it.

Like moth to flame—she was reasonably sure that particular antique wasn’t a description for things accelerating beyond prediction, which was the complaint she had been attempting to articulate.

No, the phrase fit an entirely different image, one that made her thighs clench involuntarily beneath the heavy silk of her skirt and sent a fresh pulse of wetness of her love juices around the cool, the void-ice construct still seated so perfectly, so shamelessly deep in her pussy.

Gods, the man could ruin her from across an ocean without even trying.

The construct stretched her just enough to keep her constantly, shamefully aware of how open and wet she stayed for him, a low-level throb that turned every breath into a private act of devotion.

The coffee was excellent.

The Maxton kitchens had always been excellent—that was the exquisite torture of old houses; they perfected the small, infuriating details while the rest of existence felt like a half-arsed quickie in a cheap motel.

The Maxton Ancestral Mansion wrapped itself around her with the heavy, patient breath of buildings older than countries, stone and dark wood sighing.

Then the correct application she’d been trying to solve, landed, sudden like an epiphany mid-orgasm.

Of course.

’Moth to flame did not describe escalation, Cassiopeia, you absolute, cock-drunk idiot. Pay attention. Moth to flame described the Legacy leaders.’

The way they were gathering. The way they had since Phei had arrived on Hell’s Paradise Island and begun assembling in secret cohorts the way insects swarm a porch light—drawn, desperate, wings already curling at the edges with the first delicious lick of heat.

There was madness to the way that assembly had, in hours since the Empyrean footage and the delicious public disaster of Marcus’s kneel, accelerated into something approaching panic dressed in tasteful suiting and barely concealed erections for power.

’They’re moving toward Phei the way moths move towards open flame—helpless, hypnotized, the heat too bright to ignore, the destination too obvious to mistake—and every last one of them, each in his or her own perfectly tailored way, is going to burn so prettily for the approach, cocks and cunts twitching with the same stupid, inevitable hunger.’

’Moths to flame.’

She smiled into her coffee, slow and wicked smile that would have earned her a dark, appreciative chuckle and a pat in her hair if Phei had been here to witness it. Yes. That was the correct way to use the metaphor.

Cassiopeia awarded herself a small, private point for catching up to her own metaphor before her mother could sweep in and catch her not catching up to it... her thighs were still trembling from the low, constant throb he’d left inside her like a promise signed in come and command.

And her presence here, in the patient ancient living room of the Maxton Ancestral Mansion, was—she was charmed to acknowledge—

’It’s own modest, delicious contribution to the moth-feast.’

After the days she had spent playing house and very good aunt with Phei and the Ryujin Tiamat bloodline and his women, Maddie’s bright laughter at the breakfast counter that made Cassiopeia want to sink her teeth into the sound itself, Sierra reading on the balcony with a frown that begged to be licked smooth, sweet silent but dangerous Maya—Cassiopeia had been summoned home.

The Maxton patriarchs required a report about the mission they had dispatched her on—

"Bind the Cosmic Dragon, secure his soul and deliver him to us, you are a Maxton, daughter, do not embarrass us"

—demanded accounting, and Cassiopeia had returned to the ancestral house like an intern reporting to head office with her cunt still dripping from the boss’s desk and his taste still coating her tongue.

She had given the report two hours ago.

She had said exactly what Phei had told her to say.

Word for word, punctuation included; faintly performed misdirections slotted into every load-bearing crevice, the same way she performed those little broken gasps when he pressed the void-ice deeper just to watch her eyes roll.

Every detail her family was permitted to know had been calibrated to the exact false weighting Phei had instructed.

Every detail they were not permitted to know had been omitted with the seamless, professional poise the Maxton schooling had drilled into her since she was seven and first lied convincingly to a tutor about a broken heirloom while already fantasizing about being bent over that same desk.

The report had been a masterpiece like a small, private piece of theatre performed across the long oak table upstairs, and the Maxton patriarchs had received it with the gravity they reserved for intelligence they considered real—which was to say, intelligence they had paid for and were already painfully hard for.

Two hours later, Harold had drove out to see Elliot Heavenchild.

Officially—for the same patriarchs he had just briefed—the visit was a courtesy call.

A patriarch consoling a peer over the public disaster of Marcus’s Empyrean kneel.

’Please. As if Harold Maxton would brave an ocean to console a man whose son had embarrassed himself on feed.’

Harold would not have crossed a drawing room for that.

No, the visit was cover—cover to pass on the warning about Phei’s strength his sister had just ’revealed’ to them, while simultaneously bragging about Danton’s power, all while very emphatically not mentioning that the underlying intelligence had come from his little sister.

The said sister on the other hand was currently sitting in the ancestral living room wearing Phei’s personal signature like a cunt-hugging collar of living ice.

Cassiopeia did not, in fact, mind that Harold was hoarding the information about Phei.

She simply minded that he wasn’t sharing it yet.

That was the small, private hope Phei had seeded in her, while his void-ice construct she still felt—discreetly, beautifully, obscenely—seated between her thighs at this exact moment, pulsing with the cool, patient essence of its maker.

"Tell them everything I tell you to tell them, sweetheart," he had murmured against the curve of her neck while his fingers kept her spread and dripping. "Tell them. And then trust the Maxton patriarchs to do what Maxton patriarchs always do—which is hoard, and gloat, and only share intelligence when sharing it serves them."

She had asked, half-melted and voice gone breathy the way it always did under that tone: "And what then, Master?"

And he had smiled into the column of her throat and answered with the unbothered certainty like he had already seen the next four moves and liked how they made her clench around his fingers: "And then, sweetheart, eventually they will share it. Maxtons always do. Pride moves the same way water does. And when it leaks, it carries my information through every Legacy household, and they will plan against me using the map I gave them—trusting it because it came from a Maxton inner-house meeting."

"Viruses," he had said, voice low and amused while the construct inside her throbbed in perfect, filthy time with his words.

"That is how viruses move."

Only this virus would not infect.

It would misdirect.