My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 392: The Custodian’s Shattered Pieces

Chapter 392: The Custodian’s Shattered Pieces

A/N: Pay attention and tap into when you see this; 1

Melissa Maxton stood in the corridor behind the VIP section, spine flat to the wall, both fists buried knuckle-deep in her own hair like she could physically yank the thoughts out.

The plan was fucking dead.

Whatever slow, surgical strategy she’d spent weeks stitching together—millimetre by millimetre trust, the emotional equivalent of defusing a Claymore one wire at a time—that plan was now a corpse, and her eldest daughter had gutted in under five minutes by a cropped hoodie, a hand placed on the wrong chest, and Victoria’s signature cocktail of arrogance and catastrophic timing.

She couldn’t proceed tonight. Couldn’t proceed this week. Maybe not this month. Maybe never, if the frost kept spreading.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, beautiful, impossible girl.

The situation had taught her things, though.

Several new and terrible truths, each one lodging somewhere between her ribs like broken glass she would breathe around for the rest of her life.

She had watched Phei nearly erase Victoria from the world.

She’d watched actual frost spiderweb across marble. Watched every scrap of human colour leach from eyes she had kissed a thousand times while he slept until only void remained—cold, starless, impartial.

Watched the air itself thicken into something edged and obedient, something that did not give a single fuck about bloodlines, family trees, or the inconvenient fact that the girl in its path was the daughter of the woman it loved.

Her man. Her nephew. The son of her brother—the brother she’d lost, the brother whose ghost lived in Phei’s jawline and his stubborn mouth and the way his eyes went hard when he was hurt.

Her man now, in the only definition that still mattered—beyond blood, beyond taboo, beyond any word society kept clean and folded away.

She had crossed that line with both eyes open and would cross it again tomorrow, because what lived between them wasn’t maternal, wasn’t safely familial, wasn’t anything the world had invented polite language for.

It was hers. It was ruinous.

It was the truest thing she’d ever chosen.

And her daughter. Her firstborn. The infant she’d held nineteen years ago in a too-bright hospital room and sworn the entire fucking universe to—a vow she’d broken in a thousand petty, exhausted, human ways ever since because Melissa Maxton was many things; history would never number "good mother" among them.

Victoria’s cruelty hadn’t sprouted in sterile soil.

They’d had... a falling out.

What a bloodless phrase for watching death in slow motion walk toward your child while wearing the face of the man you loved.

She pressed her forehead to the cold plaster and thought about the other cold—the one that had rolled through the VIP section like the hush before an execution. The cold that came from Phei. The cold that had been aimed, without hesitation, at the girl she’d raised.

Every fragile, idiotic hope she’d nursed—that he might find mercy, that time might soften the scar tissue, that patience and careful choreography could make him see Victoria and Sienna as people instead of weapons—had burned away in seconds.

Every hope she’d carried—every stupid, reckless, against-all-reason hope that Phei would find it in himself to forgive—had evaporated.

He had forgiven someone. He’d looked at Delilah—the same Delilah who’d helped run the machine that broke him—and found something redeemable. Had kissed her with a gentleness so pure it carved Melissa’s lungs out from the inside, because it proved the capacity still existed.

Buried under permafrost, guarded by teeth and void, but real.

She’d dared to hope the same mercy might one day stretch far enough to cover her other daughters.

She’d been realistic enough to know it wouldn’t happen quickly. She’d built the plan accordingly: months, not weeks. Controlled exposures. Letting him see them as flawed, hurting girls instead of tormentors. Letting him discover what she already knew—that Victoria’s venom had roots in places even Melissa hadn’t fully mapped, that Sienna’s silence wasn’t apathy but a different kind of scream.

But Victoria—impatient, reckless, carrying the Maxton stubbornness like a loaded gun—had to walk in dressed for conquest instead of atonement. Had to place her palm on a chest that housed a dragon and say I’m not leaving to the one boy on earth who had already passed sentence.

Melissa wanted to scream until the ceiling came down.

Melissa didn’t scream.

Instead, she pressed her nails into her palms until the half-moons turned bone-white and thought about the things that actually mattered; Her daughters.

Danton is irrelevant.1

She acknowledged it with the same flat, exhausted honesty of a woman who’d spent years performing Maternal Devotion: The Musical and was finally too fucking tired for an encore.

Whatever had happened between Phei and Danton—the beatings, the public humiliations, the slow systematic dismantling of a boy who’d spent years tormenting Phei—she wouldn’t blink if Phei came to correct that debt.

Couldn’t scrape together the energy to care. It was cold of her. She knew that. Sat with the knowledge like a stone in her mouth and swallowed it anyway.

But Phei. Victoria. Sienna. Delilah.

Those four were hers... her world really. Her heart walking around on four separate pairs of legs.

Her soul distributed across fragile, flammable bodies. The only blood that counted.

The people she would die for, kill for, ruin herself for in increasingly creative ways—and tonight she’d stood fifteen feet away, champagne flute trembling in her hand, terror clawing up her throat, watching two of them nearly annihilate each other.

She’d run.

When the frost had raced across marble like spilled quicksilver, when Phei’s eyes had emptied of every human colour and filled with the black between dead stars, when Victoria had planted her feet because her stubbornness was a congenital defect that turned every carrier into their own worst enemy—Melissa had run.

Straight toward them. Between them.

The "plan"—if you could dignify the frantic maternal arithmetic of a woman simultaneously watching her lover and her daughter collide with the label "plan"—had been brutally simple: insert body between dragon and daughter.

If he was going to turn Victoria into an ice sculpture for the VIP section’s permanent collection, he would have to freeze Melissa first.

Turn his first woman, his claimed woman, his mine into a frozen monument before he could reach the girl who’d pushed too far.

Maybe—maybe—the sight of Melissa’s face in the kill zone would pierce the void. Maybe the boy buried under scales and frost would recognise the woman who’d held him through nightmares and feel something human enough to stop.

Spare Victoria. By spending herself.

It always has additional informationGuys you’ll find out why she thinks this... It relates to when I wrote a mother to three (and not four) for those who remember. But the conspiracy is bigger and why Danton and Delilah are ’twins’.