My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 501: Fate of the Weak
Chapter 501: Fate of the Weak
One day Selene’s father was still a man with a company, a name, a future, the dangerous sort of hope that made him believe truth might actually matter, and the next day the walls started closing in from every side at once.
Suddenly there were scandals: Investigations. Embezzlement charges that seemed to rise out of the floorboards like mould. Sexual harassment allegations from employees who had apparently discovered their trauma only after someone rich enough had paid for their memory to improve.
“He lost everything,” Phei said, his voice flat in that way that usually meant the feeling underneath was anything but. “The company. His reputation. The money that was supposed to keep his family safe. All of it. Piece by piece, scandal by scandal, until there was nothing left but a broke man with a dead daughter and the kind of stubbornness that gets written on gravestones.”
They sold the house after not so long.
Left Paradise.
Moved somewhere smaller, cheaper, uglier, far enough from the gates and towers and polished little lies that the city could pretend it had never swallowed them whole.
It was the kind of place people moved to when life had finished negotiating and started collecting.
Phei kept visiting.
“The time I spent with Selene…” He trailed off for a second, and when he continued his voice had gone quieter, worn thinner around the edges. “Her parents treated me like I belonged there. I was at their house so much time. Her mother cooked for me. Her father taught me chess. They never cared that I was broke, or that I was basically a charity case, or that half my family acted like I was something embarrassing they’d found under a shoe. They just let me stay. Like it was normal. Like I mattered. They called me son. I called them Father and Mother.”
His voice cracked then, barely.
Not enough to break.
Just enough to let the fracture show.
“So even after they lost everything, I kept going. Buses across the city. Weekends. Any day I could manage it. Didn’t matter how far. Didn’t matter how tired I was.”
Outside, the city kept sliding by in long bands of evening light, but inside the car the air had gone heavy, dense with old grief and the sort of memories that never really stayed in the past no matter how politely you asked them to.
“Her father never stopped even then,” Phei said. “That was the worst part. Or maybe the best. Hard to tell with things like that. He just… kept going. Kept digging. Kept chasing justice like it was a real thing and not a bedtime story rich people told poor people to keep them obedient.”
His hand tightened on the wheel.
“It ate him alive. His health. His marriage. His sanity. Everything. But he couldn’t let it go, because how do you let go of that? How do you wake up every morning knowing your daughter put herself in the ground because some Legacy bastard broke her and the world just… shrugged?”
Maya said nothing.
“And then one day,” he said, “a truck hit them.”
The words landed in the car like a blade laid gently on a table.
No drama.
No raised voice.
Just the fact of it, clean and cold and ugly.
“He died instantly. That’s what they said. Quick. Painless. Efficient. Very considerate of the universe.” His mouth twitched, but there was no real amusement in it, only that dry, blackened humor grief sometimes wore when it got tired of screaming.
“Her mother survived. Barely. Miraculously, according to the medical reports. Which is a lovely word people use when they don’t want to say improbable.”
He looked ahead, eyes dark in the fading light.
“It wasn’t a simple naked chance.”
And there it was.
Certainty.
“After that everything collapsed,” he said. “The relatives vanished. The family friends vanished. The same people who used to turn up for birthdays and dinners and holidays suddenly forgot how phones worked. Funny how grief makes everyone busy when there’s no money left in the room.”
Selene’s mother had been left alone after the accident—injured, half-broken, unable to walk, trying to survive in a house she could no longer afford and a life that had already taken more than it was owed.
“Only Diana stayed,” Phei said, and for the first time since he began that part of the story, something gentler slipped into his voice. “She’s the only one who stayed. Took care of her. Fed her. Bathed her. She did everything.”
Diana.
The woman with the kind eyes and quick hands.
The woman at the hospital entrance, always moving, always carrying something, always one inch from exhaustion and somehow still upright.
“But Diana had to work too,” he went on. “Bills don’t stop just because your life does. Rent. Medication. Appointments. Hospital fees. Food. Every ugly little number that keeps coming even when you’ve got nothing left to give. She couldn’t be there every second. Nobody can. Doesn’t matter how much they love you.”
His thumb moved slowly over Maya’s knuckle, tracing absent circles like he needed the contact to keep himself anchored.
“I helped where I could. Part-time jobs. Whatever I could pick up. A few hundred here, a little more there. Never enough. It’s something I never told anyone. In all those jobs I only bought a stupid laptop which later Sienna destroyed.” His laugh came out soft and tired.
“But everything I earned went there. I was barely holding my own life together. Trying to save someone else’s with part-time wages was… optimistic.”
“All me and Diana were able to afford was a normal ward and basic treatments. You know how Paradise works.”
He stopped for a moment.
“But then the everything I am now happened. And Melissa happened. And her card.”
The card.
“I asked Melissa for help, after I moved into the penthouse,” he said. “Told her what I needed the money for, and she agreed before I even finished explaining.” This time the smile did come, small and strange and full of things too tangled to name easily. “Didn’t ask how much. Didn’t ask why. Just said yes, like I’d asked her to pass the salt.”
Because of course she had known.
Melissa always seemed to know.
Not everything, maybe, but enough. Enough to hear the shape of the wound before he gave it a name, enough to understand that some requests were not favors at all, just debts the heart decided to pay before the mind could argue.
“The next day I spoke to Diana. Made arrangements. Selene’s mother got transferred from the normal ward to the VIP floor. Private room. Full-time care. Every bill handled. Doctors, specialists, rehab equipment, whatever she needed.” He exhaled slowly. “That was only a few weeks ago. But I’d been visiting her long before that. Before anything. Before Melissa’s help. Before any of this insanity.”
His voice softened again.
“I’d sit with her for as long as they allowed, then come back and do it again.”
The car turned into the underground parking of Sovereign Tower.
“If you wondered why they know me… it’s because the nurses know me because I was there before the money changed anything,” Phei said. “The room got nicer, the flowers got more expensive, the meals stopped looking like institutional revenge, sure. I loved combing her hair.”
He parked.
Turned off the engine.
And for a few seconds, neither of them moved.
When he spoke again, the words came out lower, rougher, stripped clean of everything except truth.
“She’s not my mother. Not by blood. But Selene was the girl I loved, and her parents…” He stopped, then tried again. “Her parents were the only people who ever made me feel like I mattered before I became useful.”
That one hurt.
You could hear it.
“Now Selene is dead. Her father was murdered. Her mother is lying in a hospital bed with legs that don’t work, a family that ran, and a life that got dismantled because she happened to love people the Heavenchilds decided to erase.”
He turned his head then and looked at Maya fully, no distance left, no shield. “The only people she has are Diana and me.”
His eyes held hers.
“So yeah,” he said quietly. “She’s my mother. She’s the only mother I’ve got.”
The car went still after that.
Maya reached across the console.
Then both hands were around his.
Small hands, warm hands, fingers sliding through his and holding tight, not delicately, not fearfully, but with that quiet, stubborn steadiness she had, like she was telling him without words that he didn’t have to carry every ghost alone tonight.
She didn’t say she was sorry.
Didn’t say it was terrible.
Didn’t tell him he was strong, because strength was such a cheap little word when people used it to decorate suffering they had never had to survive themselves.
She just held his hands.
And in that moment, with the evening pressing close and the dark settling in around the tower, that was enough.
