My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 268: Find Her, Oh, Little Dragon

"To stop her." A wet, rattling cough tore through him; fresh blood sprayed across his lips, black in the firelight, flecked with foam. His eyes—those impossible amethyst eyes—never wavered from hers. "And to avenge this. All of it. Every drop of blood they’ve spilled. Every life they’ve taken. Phei is the key, little sister. He’s the only one who can."

The heat was no longer creeping. It was rising. A living thing now, pressing against her skin, singeing the fine hairs on her arms, drying the blood on her palms into sticky crusts. Flames licked at the undercarriage, hungry, patient, finding every puddle of leaking fuel and turning it into promise.

The air tasted like scorched metal and salt and burning hair.

They had minutes. Maybe less.

"We need to go." She yanked at him again, harder, desperate, nails digging into his wrist as if she could pull life back into him through sheer will. "Both of us, Seiryū, please—"

He shoved her.

Not hard—he had no hard left—but deliberate. Enough to break her hold. Enough to force distance. Enough to carve the truth into her chest: he was not leaving this car. He had never intended to.

"Protect him."

His voice was steel wrapped in silk. A command carved from dying lungs. A prayer exhaled through blood. A dying man’s final, unbreakable wish.

"Raise him. Love him. Keep him safe. But do not ever... ever pamper him or fight his battles!"

His gaze burned into hers—"And when he’s ready—only when he’s ready—give it to him. He’ll know. The blood remembers."

"Give him what? Seiryū, I don’t—"

"You’ll understand." A smile flickered across his ruined face. Soft. Sad. The smile of a brother saying goodbye to the sister he’d carried on his shoulders through childhood summers, to the life slipping through his fingers like wet sand, to the future he would never touch. "You’re my family, Melissa. The only one I trust with this. With him."

"Seiryū—"

"NOW!"

The word detonated from his chest.

Not a shout. A roar.

Something ancient. Primal. Other. It rolled through the wreckage like thunder trapped in a ribcage, shaking the twisted metal, making the smoke twist into violent spirals, making the remaining glass shiver into fine cracks.

Melissa felt it in her marrow—a low, resonant frequency that rattled teeth and vibrated ribs and woke something sleeping deep in her blood.

The roar of a dragon.

"SAVE MY SON NOW!"

She moved.

Not just because she chose to. Every muscle, every nerve, every screaming instinct begged her to stay—to claw at the seatbelt until her fingers broke, to drag him free even if it meant burning with him.

But Seiryū had asked. Seiryū had commanded.

And she was still—always—his little sister. The girl who’d trailed after him through every shadowed alley and sunlit field, who’d believed he could fix anything, who had never once refused her of anything, the one she could never disobey.

The back door was crumpled inward like paper crushed in a fist. Jammed tight.

She attacked it. Fingers numb and bleeding tore at the handle, nails splitting down to the quick, splintering against metal. She wedged her shoulder into the gap—dislocated joint grinding fresh agony through her nerves—and heaved. Something inside the frame snapped.

The door gave with a shriek of tortured steel.

She reached in.

Pulled Phei into her arms.

He was so light.

That was what finally cracked her open—how impossibly light he was. This small, shivering thing who had just had his entire world ripped away, whose soft pants were soaked in blood that wasn’t his, whose purple eyes stared up at her wide and shattered and far too young to carry this much ruin.

"Auntie Mel..." His voice was threadbare. A plea thinner than paper. "Auntie Mel, Mommy won’t wake up."

"I know, baby."

"She won’t—I keep calling her and she won’t—"

"I know." She was already stumbling backward, legs shaking, away from the car, away from the thickening black smoke, away from the flames now crawling up the undercarriage like eager tongues. "I know, sweetheart. Come with Auntie. Come on."

"But Daddy too—"

"We have to go."

"No!" He thrashed suddenly. Wild. Strong. Small fists hammering her chest with force that shouldn’t have belonged to a seven-year-old. "No! I want Daddy! I WANT MY DADDY AND MOMMY!"

"Phei—"

"DADDY!"

He broke free.

She never saw it coming.

One heartbeat he was in her arms, the next he’d twisted—slipped her grip with a serpentine strength that made her chest carve in and her stomach lurch—and a sound ripped from his throat. Half scream. Half something older. Something that made the air itself hum with low, dangerous vibration.

He ran.

Straight back toward the car.

Toward the flames licking higher.

Toward his father, still pinned, still bleeding, still dying while his son sprinted toward him as though love alone could unmake death if you just loved hard enough.

"PHEI, NO—"

She lunged.

Too slow.

He was already at the shattered window, small hands thrusting through jagged glass without hesitation, shards slicing open tender palms in bright red lines he didn’t seem to feel. He grabbed his father’s arm—fingers leaving bloody prints on bloody skin—and pulled.

Phei’s small hands—soft, unscarred until tonight—clamped around his father’s limp arm with desperate ferocity. Blood from the glass cuts on his palms smeared bright red streaks across Seiryū’s already-soaked sleeve, but the boy didn’t notice. Didn’t flinch. He pulled.

"Daddy, come on!"

He strained—back arched, skinny legs braced against the crumpled doorframe, every tendon in his neck standing out like wire. A seven-year-old trying to haul two hundred pounds of dying muscle and bone through a jagged hole no wider than his shoulders.

The metal groaned in protest; the seatbelt creaked as it bit deeper into Seiryū’s chest. Phei’s face twisted with effort, tears carving clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks.

"Daddy, please! We have to go!"

His voice cracked higher on every word, raw from screaming, but he kept pulling—kept heaving—like if he could just move his father one inch, the whole nightmare would reverse. Like love could bend physics if he loved hard enough.

Then—without letting go of Seiryū’s arm—his other hand stretched toward the passenger seat.

Toward Mei-Lin.

Fingers trembling, reaching past the twisted console, past the deflated airbag hanging like pale skin, toward his mother’s slack hand that dangled inches from the floor.

"Mommy..."

The word came out small. Broken. A child’s last hope whispered into the roar of approaching fire.

His fingertips brushed hers—cold, limp, unresponsive—and something inside him fractured audibly. A sob tore free, wet and animal, but he didn’t pull back. He grabbed her hand instead, wrapping his bloody little fingers around hers as tightly as he held his father’s arm.

"Mommy, wake up. Please. Daddy needs help. Daddy you can’t—"

He tugged both of them now—father in one direction, mother in the other—like he could stitch them back together through sheer will.

Like if he held on long enough, the blood would flow backward, the bones would knit, the snapped neck would straighten, and they would open their eyes and smile and tell him it was all a bad dream.

Seiryū looked at his son.

And the smile that crossed his face was the most beautiful, most terrible thing Melissa had ever seen.

It was soft—achingly soft—the same smile he’d worn the day Phei was born, the day he’d held that tiny, squirming bundle and whispered "hello, little dragon" like a secret between them.

But now it was painted in blood, cracked across lips gone pale, lit from below by the hungry orange glow of flames that had already begun to claim his legs. Beautiful because it was love in its purest, most helpless form. Terrible because it was goodbye wearing love’s face.

"Find your sister, little dragon."

Phei’s hands stilled.

The small fingers still wrapped around his father’s arm froze mid-pull. His tear-slick face tilted up, confusion cutting through the panic.

"What?"

"Find your sister." A bloody hand—shaking, impossibly steady—reached up. Touched the boy’s cheek.

Left a perfect crimson handprint across that soft, tear-streaked skin: five fingers splayed like a brand, like a blessing, like a promise sealed in the last of his father’s blood. "When the time comes. She’ll need you. And you’ll need her."

"I don’t—Daddy, I don’t understand—Come out please—"

"I know." So gentle. So peaceful. The voice of a man who had already crossed over and come back just to say this one thing. "But you will. One day, you’ll understand everything."

"Daddy—"

"I love you, Phei." His voice was fading now, thinning to a thread. The light in his amethyst eyes dimmed like a lantern running out of oil. But still he held on—just long enough. "Your mother loved you. Never forget that. Never forget what you are."

His hand slipped from Phei’s cheek.

Fell limp against the seatbelt.

His eyes found Melissa’s one last time—clear, certain, trusting.

"NOW."

She grabbed Phei.

Tore him from the window.

Didn’t listen to his screaming, his thrashing, the way his nails raked bloody furrows down her forearms. Didn’t listen to the raw, animal howls ripping from his throat or the way his small body bucked against her like she was the one killing them all over again.

She only heard Seiryū’s command echoing inside her skull, steel-wrapped and unbreakable.

She ran.

Ten feet.

Twenty.

The explosion caught them anyway.