My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 668 - 668: Thousandfold Debt Promise

His shoulders jerked upward toward his ears in a violent shrug that had nothing to do with intent and everything to do with his nervous system short-circuiting.

His bowels, empty as they were, tried to cramp anyway — a dry, tearing contraction that felt like his guts were being wrung out by invisible fists — and he whimpered through his shattered teeth, a pathetic animal sound that bubbled up from somewhere deep and broken.

He tried to scrabble backward.

His legs wouldn’t move. Or couldn’t — the distinction had stopped mattering hours ago. Both knees were past the point where they could be asked to cooperate with anything; the patellae ground against each other like broken glass with every microscopic twitch.

His arms tried while his palms flattened against the ruined carpet behind him and he pushed, and his shattered fingers folded backward under his own weight with wet, meaty cracks, sending fresh lightning bolts of agony straight up his arms.

He made yet another one of those dry-whistle sounds and gave up, collapsing in on himself like a puppet whose strings had been cut by a butcher.

So, he just shook. Visibly and violently. Every part of him shaking in waves that traveled from his shoulders to his hips to his broken knees and back again, rhythmic, uncontrollable, like a seizure his body had slipped into because it no longer knew how to be still.

Foam had gathered at the corners of his mouth — thin, pink-tinged, bubbling slightly with every ragged exhale that smelled of bile and blood and the sour rot of a man who had already begun to die from the inside out.

His eyes were so bloodshot the whites had gone pink-red, the irises swimming in fresh tears that had no more salt left in them, just watery pink despair.

Because in his mind — in the ruined, shaking, Eira-haunted mind behind those eyes — it had been Phei.

Every hour of the last however-many-it-had-been. Every fresh agony. Every horror Eira had carved into his consciousness had worn Phei’s face.

Every nightmare had spoken with Phei’s voice. Every hand that tore at him and broke him and healed him and broke him again had been Phei’s hand.

The fairy had been an efficiency measure.

The man standing in front of him now, in Jonathan’s mind, was the architect of every second of his suffering — the dragon who had personally peeled his skin, crushed his bones, and laughed while doing it.

Phei stepped closer.

Smiled.

“Jonathan.”

The older man flinched like he’d been struck by a live wire, his entire body jerking so hard something popped wetly in his neck.

“I don’t see him.” Phei looked around the ruined bedroom with casual, almost theatrical curiosity. “The man from dinner. The one with all the opinions. The one who called my aunt all those interesting things at the head of his own table. Where is he? I came all this way. Surely he has something else to say?”

“P— please—”

Jonathan’s mouth was working, spit and blood trailing from the corner of his lip in thick strings.

He was trying to form words and failing, trying to apologize and finding that his throat had forgotten the shape of the sounds, every syllable scraping across raw vocal cords like broken glass.

“Please— I’m— I’m sorry — I’m so sorry — I didn’t—”

“You didn’t what?”

Phei crouched but not close, just within reach and close enough for Jonathan to see every detail of his calm, perfect face.

“You didn’t mean it? You didn’t know what you were doing? You didn’t think what you were planning for Sierra — your own daughter — was worth mentioning when you were busy telling me about what kind of broken toy she’d become under my attention?”

“How dare you.” The words landed like glass splinters driven into bone.

“How dare you sit at your table and call my woman those things while you were already negotiating your daughter’s sacrifice. How dare you plan a death of your own flesh and blood and then have the energy left over to be rude to mine. How dare you think — for one single second — that you were the wronged party in any of this.”

Jonathan was sobbing now. Not prettily but ugly, animal sobs — his entire nervous system had been disassembled and had not yet figured out how to stop producing moisture, every heave of his chest ripping fresh pain through his crushed ribs and spasming guts.

Phei let him cry for a moment.

Then crouched lower. Until his face was level with Jonathan’s. Until there was nowhere for the older man to look that wasn’t him — no escape, no mercy, no corner of the room that didn’t belong to the dragon now.

“Do you remember,” Phei said softly, almost gently, “what I told you at dinner?”

Jonathan made a sound. It might have been a word. It wasn’t. It was just more broken noise.

“I told you,” Phei continued, voice gentle, almost conversational, “that I’m the kind of man who doesn’t forget when someone insults the women he loves. I told you I’m the kind of man who takes care of what’s his. And I told you —” his head tilted, slow and patient, “— that I’m the kind of man who always pays his debts.”

A small pause. He let it sit, let the silence press down on the broken man like a boot on a throat.

“You laughed, didn’t you? Inside. I saw it on your face. The little flicker behind your eyes when I said it. You thought it was a teenager being theatrical at your dinner table. A charity case making speeches.

“A boy with no real consequences playing dress-up in a man’s threats.”

He smiled.

“How am I doing on the follow-through, Mr. Montgomery?”

Jonathan made the dust-rattle sound again. It cracked into a whistle that shredded what was left of his vocal cords, the sound wet and bubbling and utterly inhuman.

He couldn’t even nod — his neck wouldn’t take the order, the muscles there spasming in useless little twitches like a dying insect.

“You called my Melissa names.” The smile didn’t move. The voice stayed soft, almost kind. “You called my cousins broken. You called my women a stud farm. You sat at the head of your table in a silk shirt that cost more than most people’s cars, and you tried — sloppily, but you tried — to make every woman I love feel like less than she is.

“And then you went upstairs after we left and you beat your wife so badly the bruises went down to her ankles. Because you couldn’t take it out on me, so you took it out on her.”

He let that sit, too. Let the silence fill the room like the stink of Jonathan’s own waste.

“I told you I always pay my debts.”

His hand opened.

The ice dagger conjured itself into his palm — void-black along the blade, frost crackling along the edge with a sound like breaking bones, the hilt forming around his grip with a soft, almost affectionate hiss of freezing air.

He slid the flat of the blade under Jonathan’s chin.

Lifted.

“Look at me.”

Jonathan’s eyes dropped to the floor in pure animal panic.

“I said fucking look at me, Jonathan.”

The older man’s head jerked up as if someone else had yanked the strings with a meat hook. His eyes met Phei’s — and the moment they did, something in the back of his skull broke. Twin trails of blood began to trickle from the corners of his eyes, thin and slow at first, then carving wet red lines down his filthy cheeks as capillaries burst like overripe fruit.

He held the gaze anyway.

Because he didn’t have the option not to.

Phei studied him for a long, patient moment, drinking in the ruin like fine wine.

“You know what’s funny?” His voice was soft. Almost thoughtful. “I don’t actually need to do this next part.” After all the system already gave him the reward, but rewards were optional right now.

“I could just walk out. Let the torture continue. Let you live the rest of your life jumping at shadows until your heart finally quits in some hotel room five years from now, shitting yourself every time the lights flicker.”

He tilted his head.

“But I’m curious.”

His grin spread, slow and terrible.

“Cosmic Dragon Face.”

The words didn’t echo.

They landed.

Inside Jonathan… his whole body convulsed — a violent, full-length seizure that snapped his spine backward until the back of his skull hit the carpet with a wet crack that split the already-ruined floorboards.

His limbs flailed wildly. and not the controlled flail of a man trying to run, but the jerking, disorganized spasm of a body that had lost every connection to its own nervous system at once, nerves firing in chaotic, white-hot overload.

His heels kicked and drummed against the soaked carpet. His arms thrashed so hard the already-broken fingers splintered further with audible wet pops.