My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 791: Eternal Pain

Melissa did not turn. She set the jacket down on the sofa. Smoothed it with her palm.

"Sure, Cassiopeia. You’ve got it." Melissa was in no mood to argue with the woman from the start and preferred Cassiopeia got everything she wanted and got out of her face and room.

Cassiopeia’s face tightened.

"What is this, Melissa... You know what I am. His... his slave for eternity. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I cannot betray him — I would die before I let harm come to either of you and you know that. You know about this enough to know I am not lying. Is that not enough? Can an eternity of devotion not, somehow, somewhere, erase my wrongs?"

Melissa laughed.

It was not the dry chuckle.

The real one — a small, bright, merciless sound that came up out of Melissa’s chest with the quiet, helplessness of a woman who had just been asked something so far outside the grammar of her actual life that the only available response was bitter amusement.

Then the laugh broke in the middle. Cleanly like piece of glass that had been holding a shape for too long finally accepted that the shape was a lie and gave up holding it.

She turned and looked at Cassiopeia in the eye — except the eyes that did the looking were not, for the first time in any of this, dry.

There was a wet shine along her lower lashes.

"Cassiopeia."

"Melissa."

Her voice was very quiet.

"Do you know what else lasts for eternity...?"

Silence filled the entire room Cassiopeia’s heart tighten into a cold stone — the long pale sofa, the careful piles of folded clothes, the tablet in Emily’s lap, the late vespertine light slanting in across the floor — the room held its breath, because every woman present understood, before the next sentence had been spoken, what kind of sentence was coming.

Melissa’s voice broke, very slightly, on the first word.

She did not stop.

"...A mother’s pain..."

A small, unsteady breath.

"...For her lost child."

Cassiopeia’s body locked in place as if something ancient and merciless had reached inside her heart and closed its fist around her spine.

She did not fall.

The same merciless discipline the Maxton women had carved into her since she was old enough to stand kept her upright in the doorway with her spine straight, shoulders square, the way they had trained her to remain even when the world was ending.

But everything else inside her simply stopped. Her ribs, breath, her hands, which had been resting lightly on the doorframe like a woman politely taking her leave, suddenly clamped down hard, knuckles whitening against the dark wood until she could feel the grain biting into her palms, because if she let go Cassiopeia knew she would collapse on her knees right there in the doorway like a puppet with its strings cut.

Across the room, Emily felt a sharp little jolt in her own chest when Melissa’s first tear slipped free and traced a slow, lonely path down her cheek, leaving a faint, glistening trail on skin that had once been flawless and was now marked by years of quiet suffering.

The tear caught the light for a moment before it fell, vanishing into the fabric of her sleeve like it had never existed at all.

Melissa lifted one hand and wiped the tear away with the back of her fingers. Her hand stayed steady but her voice did not.

"But sure."

She said quietly, shaking breath that tasted of old grief and something sharper.

"What do you know about the pain of a mother. Hm? Surely all of this is just —"

"M-Melissa." The name cracked as it left Cassiopeia’s mouth, raw in her throat. "I — I understand —"

Melissa laughed.

It was the same laugh as before. Bright. Merciless. Only now it had teeth, and the sound of it scraped against the walls like something meant to draw blood.

"Do you, Cassiopeia. Do you really understand though?" She let her hand fall to her side, the dampness of that single tear still clinging to her skin. "Is that why you’re standing in my doorway? To tell me you understand? To rub it in my face? To pretend that everything that happened — every single thing that happened while I and my children were under Maxton rooftop — can be wiped clean just because you’re standing here looking pretty and calling yourself his eternal slave?"

She tilted her head, studying her like something broken she no longer recognized, eyes cold and bright with eighteen years of buried rage.

"To try replace my dead child with your eternal servitude?"

The silence that followed was small and horrified, thick enough to taste.

"Are those the same thing to you?" Melissa asked, voice dangerously soft, the words landing like bruises. "In your head? Are they truly the same?"

"M-Melissa, I’m sorry—"

"Do you even comprehend what you’ve done today?"

Melissa’s voice had risen, just a fraction. She still wasn’t screaming neither was she still crying beyond that single tear.

But the voice, the voice had begun to take on the small fine edge, sharpened into a blade — the sound of a woman who had spent years waiting for a Maxton to stand in her doorway and ask for forgiveness.

The air in the room seemed to tighten around the words.

"Do you even comprehend, Cassiopeia, the slightest scope of anything you have just done today. Do you. Do you think — do you genuinely think — that just because Phei has enslaved you, the slate is clean. That you are welcome to the family. That eighteen years of your family’s wrongs are paid by one Mark on your soul and one obedient afternoon of pouring tea for my Phei?"

The words hung in the air like smoke.

"M-Melissa, I never said —"

"You know what, Cassiopeia."

Melissa started walking. Slow. Deliberate. Reality seemed to creak faintly beneath her with her steps.

She stopped three feet from the doorway and looked at Cassiopeia properly for the first time since the conversation began, close enough that Cassiopeia could see the faint tremor in her lower lip, the way her eyes had gone glassy with unshed tears she refused to let fall.

"If Phei hadn’t enslaved you," she said quietly, "you would still be the same old Cassiopeia Maxton. Wouldn’t you?"

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A/N:Guys, honestly, tell me what you think about this Cassiopeia and Melissa confrontation.