My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 815: Glitters of Paradise

The luminescence of Downtown Paradise poured through the penthouse windows in long, silken veils of amber, pearl, and platinum, bathing the city beyond the glass in such resplendent glamour that one could almost forgive it for being rotten.

Almost.

Paradise glittered with the obscene confidence of a lie that had been told for so long it had acquired architectural permits. Towers rose from the dark earth like spears of gold while skybridges burned with soft white light.

The avenues below shone beneath streams of traffic, every vehicle polished into a moving fragment of wealth, every billboard selling fragrance, banking, beauty, eternity, and other things mankind had no business promising while still failing at basic decency. From this height, the city looked peaceful. Safe and divinely curated.

A metropolis dressed for a wedding while hiding the corpse behind the altar.

Roxanne knew better.

She lay beneath the light and thought, with a bitterness too tired to sharpen itself properly: ’Not everything that glittered was gold.’

Or was it all that glitters?

She could not remember.

The saying had always annoyed her. It belonged to the category of wisdom people repeated with grave little nods while doing absolutely nothing useful with it, over champagne before returning home to mistreat their staff and call it discipline.

Whether the correct phrase was not everything or all, it hardly mattered.

Paradise was the proof, the sermon, cathedral, the execution platform, and the glittering blade.

The city was beautiful.

That was the cruelty of it.

Evil should have been ugly with warning bells, leaking ceilings, rotten breath, and stains no decorator could hide.

But Paradise had learned the oldest trick of power: polish the surface until the eye becomes too dazzled to ask what is beneath it. Every golden window hid a bargain while marble corridor carried whispers.

The famous charity gala floated above old blood like rose petals on black water.

This city did not lie crudely. It lied with taste imported chandeliers, hand-carved doors, diplomatic smiles, and women in jewels heavy enough to finance small wars pretending not to know what their husbands did after midnight.

Roxanne had lived inside that glitter for decades.

’Thirty years is what it took me to understand its true colors.’

Long before Jonathan, marriage and long before the word wife stopped sounding like a vow and began sounding like a sentence passed in installments of silence, bruises, and carefully rehearsed obedience.

Roxanne had been raised into the luminous machinery of Downtown Paradise and had learned early that the city’s lights did not banish darkness. They trained it. They fed it and taught it how to wear perfume and sit correctly at dinner.

Then, two decades ago, she married Jonathan Montgomery.

A mistake? No.

That word was too small, domestic and way too forgiving. A mistake was spilling wine on a dress or choosing the wrong florist for a gala.

Marrying Jonathan had been an entire catastrophe wearing cufflinks, one that shook her hand at the altar and smiled for the cameras while the future that awaited her quietly loaded a gun.

Whatever she had once called love had not died all at once.

That would have been kinder.

It had curdled slowly, year after year, until the soft thing in her chest became something sour and unrecognizable.

Hope had thinned first, then trust, lastly was the tender, foolish belief that a husband’s hand was meant to touch and not punish. Jonathan’s cruelty had not arrived like a storm. Storms had honesty and announced themselves, broke what they wished to break, and left.

Jonathan had been worse; akin to weather designed by accountants.

The beatings were the obvious part.

The part the world would understand if it ever cared enough to look. A bruise could be pointed at. A split lip could be photographed. A fractured rib could be written into a medical report and filed away somewhere sterile.

Physical pain was terrible, but it was at least honest in its vulgarity. It arrived, hurt, and left evidence behind like an idiot criminal.

Jonathan was not an idiot; that was the true horror.

He had understood, with the leisurely intelligence of a man born into power and raised without moral supervision, that a woman who could endure fists required subtler instruments. A body learned to brace, the skin healed. Bone knitted itself back together with bleak loyalty.

But the mind, if pressed correctly, if trapped inside duties, reputations, maternal terror, and the elegant prison of high society, could be made to assist in its own destruction.

So he had built cages no one could see just like the almost every night beatings.

He manufactured feuds, designed enemies and drafted performances and called them loyalty.

Roxanne had been forced into conflict with Melissa for years, not because she hated Melissa, not because some ancient poison sat between them, but because Jonathan needed House Montgomery to maintain dominion over Orchid House, and he needed his wife to prove before the other Patriarchs that she could be useful, obedient, and cruel on command by taking control of the house from Melissa.

A team player.

’What a charming phrase.’

The human civilization had a remarkable talent for taking spiritual mutilation and dressing it in corporate vocabulary.

Roxanne remembered all of the things she’d done for the man who at night would beat her.

She remembered the scripts he had placed in her mouth, the little phrases designed to wound, the exact tone she was expected to use, the punishment waiting at home whenever her performance failed to convince the audience.

And the dinner with Phei.

Gods.

That dinner still lived in her like a shard of glass.

The things Jonathan had required her to say at that table in front of Melissa, Sierra and the contempt.

The vile little degradations wrapped in the voice of a woman too proud to tremble. Roxanne could still hear herself saying them, could still feel her own daughter’s eyes burning into her, could still feel the invisible noose around her throat tightening with every word.

She had not spoken to wound Melissa; Roxanne had spoken to keep Sierra safe. Every insult had been a shield held backward, ugly and necessary, because the monster beside her had always known where to strike if Roxanne disobeyed.

’Phei at the end understood luckily.’

That thought was a strange.

Phei had actually understood why the performance had been necessary. He understood that every cruel word had been paid for before it was spoken.

’How’s he seventeen, really.’

Phei’s emotional intelligence was something of amazement.

He understood that Roxanne had not been attacking Melissa from hatred, but from terror so old and disciplined it had learned to stand straight in public.

Melissa did not understand.

To Melissa Ryujin Tiamat, Roxanne was still that Montgomery woman, the antagonist who always attacked her with no reason whatsoever.

The polished viper from Orchid House, spiteful, inexplicably hostile presence who had spent years undermining her at meetings, luncheons, and all those exquisitely stupid social battlegrounds where the wealthy pretended flowers, seating arrangements, and charity auctions were matters of national security.

Melissa did not know about Jonathan’s fists. She did not know about the scripts.

Neither did she know what punishment awaited at home whenever Roxanne failed to sound hateful enough.

’Why should she when she’s the victim?’

And Paradise did not reward truth but performance and Roxanne had performed beautifully.

That was the ugliest part.

’I had been convincing, didn’t I?’

Then there was Sierra.

Her daughter.

Her brilliant, wounded, righteous daughter, who had allowed her mother to speak with Phei in that bedroom and had given her that much, at least despite what had happened at the dinner.

That one conversation was like a crack in the wall and a fragile mercy from Sierra to her mother.

Then silence.

Not a single call after she left with him or a single message even a hesitant voice note at midnight.

Nothing.

The silence had become its own room, cold and locked out from access to her mother, and Roxanne had been sitting outside it ever since.

She understood, of course.

But even the understanding did not make it hurt less.

That was another lie adults told themselves because screaming into pillows was undignified and rarely matched the curtains.

Sierra believed what any daughter raised inside that marriage would believe; that her mother and father had moved as one, spoke against her man and her sister (Melissa) as one, wounded as one.

She had seen Jonathan and Roxanne sitting side by side, hosting dinners, attending galas, signing family decisions with the same surname pressed beneath them like a seal.

She had never seen the private cost of that unity and had never seen her mother bargaining with pain before breakfast.

Or when Roxanne was kneeling on the bathroom floor with one hand over her mouth so the staff would not hear.

Sierra had never seen the woman behind the wife and the mother.

To Sierra, Jonathan’s words and Roxanne’s words had come from the same mouth.

And the woman Phei had came with at the table woman Sierra called sister, had heard Roxanne’s cruelty at that table; Melissa had heard it and Sierra had been hurt by it.

The poison had gone out into the world with Roxanne’s voice wrapped around it, and now the world, being predictably lazy, had decided the voice and the poison were the same thing

Roxanne sighed.

The sound barely disturbed the room.

Her penthouse rose around her in extravagant silence, vast and polished and brutally lonely.

The windows climbed from the living room floor in immense dark-framed panels, rising toward one another in a dramatic chevron before diverging again into shadow near the ceiling. It was architecture with theatrical instincts, because apparently even glass in Paradise had an ego.