Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Venna and I stepped out of the dark room and into the corridor. The light coming through the windows hit my eyes like a slap after the total blackness inside. I blinked hard for a second, the world blurring before it settled back into focus.

"You good?" Venna asked.

"Yeah," I said, still blinking through the sting.

We started walking toward the exit, passing the reception room.

"You’re not going to say goodbye to Abuela?" I asked.

Venna kept her eyes straight ahead. "We don’t say goodbyes here."

"Why not?"

"I don’t know," she answered simply.

I didn’t press it. Some rules existed long before anyone remembered the reasons behind them.

The two men still stood sentinel at the entrance like statues, silent and unmoving. Venna walked past them without a glance or a word. I followed, feeling their unseen eyes on my back. No goodbyes there either.

We reached the car. The metal was warm from the sun, almost hot to the touch. I slid into the passenger seat while the remnants of the memory kept feeding on me from within—tearing at the edges of my mind exactly as Venna had warned. An unfinished wound. A hook buried deep, pulling me back toward the plain, the bite, the shadow that had watched me run.

Venna settled behind the wheel, one hand resting lightly on it. She looked over at me, her expression unreadable. "Where are you heading?"

"CGI headquarters," I said.

"Former CGI," she corrected, the ghost of a small smile touching her lips—there and gone like a flicker of light.

"Yeah."

We were both filling the silence with small words, but something heavier sat underneath everything we said. Her thoughts were somewhere distant, a shadowed depth I couldn’t reach. A secret or a worry hovering just beneath the calm surface of her face.

"Things change so fast," she murmured. The engine rumbled to life.

We drove through the capital in weighted quiet. Late afternoon light stretched long and molten gold across the streets, painting glass towers and weathered stone in warm, almost forgiving tones. Shadows lengthened like reaching fingers. People moved along sidewalks in their usual hurried rhythm—oblivious to the storm still raging inside the walls. The city pulsed with life, engines humming, distant voices, the scent of street food and exhaust drifting through the window. Yet it all felt one step removed, like I was watching it through cracked glass.

By the time Venna pulled up in front of the CGI building, the sun was sinking low and bloody. Deep oranges and fierce reds bled across the sky, setting the structure ablaze in firelight. The building loomed ahead—once a symbol of power, now something completely new.

She leaned back in her seat, still wearing the same black dress from her mother’s burial, the fabric absorbing the dying light. I didn’t open the door immediately. I stared through the windshield at the building, then at nothing in particular, the weight of everything pressing down on my chest.

"Why do you trust me?" I asked.

The question hung thick in the confined space of the car, heavier than the humid evening air. Venna turned her head slowly. The last of the golden light caught in her blue hair, turning it into strands of living flame. Those ancient-clear eyes locked onto mine—steady, piercing, unflinching—holding me in a gaze that felt like it could peel back every layer I’d ever built. For a long moment, neither of us breathed.

Venna sighed, sinking deeper into the driver’s seat as if the weight of years suddenly pressed on her shoulders. "You don’t get it. Do you."

I looked at her. In that single glance, she had dismantled something inside me without even trying. I had walked into that cemetery with a blade-sharp purpose, and now it lay scattered, unrecognizable.

"I was four years old," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "First dream. Your face. Exactly like this—every line, every shadow."

I stayed silent, the air in the car suddenly too thick to breathe.

"Every night since then."

"Venna." I turned fully toward her, the leather seat creaking under me. "You don’t know me. You don’t know what I want, or why I was even at that cemetery today."

She didn’t flinch. Those ancient-clear eyes held mine without mercy. "I know."

"You don’t," I insisted, the words heavy with the full, brutal truth of it. The truth of why I’d gone to that cemetery in the first place.

Outside the CGI building, Sherry stepped through the glass doors, scanned the street with sharp eyes, then vanished back inside like a ghost.

"My mother showed me your face," Venna continued, her tone steady despite the tremor beneath it. "Days before she died."

The words hit like ice water down my spine.

"She wanted us to meet. That’s all she told me."

She glanced down at her lap for a heartbeat—black dress pooling like spilled ink—then lifted her gaze again, fierce and vulnerable all at once.

"We didn’t just meet, Abram." A fragile pause stretched between us. "You know that."

I didn’t answer. Because deep beneath the armor of resistance I still carried, I did know it. The knowing sat in my chest like a second heartbeat—unwanted, undeniable. I just had no idea what the hell to do with it.

She reached across the console and pressed her wrist firmly against mine. Our watches met with a soft, resonant click, the scanners flashing once in quiet acknowledgment.

"Whenever you need me," she said, the promise simple and absolute.

I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cooling evening air. The golden light of the dying sun wrapped around me, warm and heavy, carrying the faint scent of city dust and distant rain. It felt too gentle for the storm raging inside.

Something about Venna Belmonte sat differently from anyone I’d encountered since crossing the life layer. It wasn’t the raw, magnetic pull of the marking. It wasn’t the cold machinery of the system. It was quieter. Older. Deeper than both—like a current running beneath the world itself—and I still had no word for it.

I walked around the car and raised a hand in farewell.

Sherry now stood outside the building, arms crossed, watching the entire exchange with unreadable intensity.

Venna’s car pulled away smoothly, tires whispering over asphalt as it melted into the molten orange and blood-red light of the sinking sun. The golden hour painted everything in fire and farewell.

[You can ask me anything. I have the answers.]

Just stop. For God’s sake.