My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 436: Watching from Afar

“Date with Patricia Bloom,” Eira supplied, crystalline wings fluttering beside him as they stepped into the elevator. “Forty-five minutes. She’s been ready since the evening—pacing, reapplying lip gloss, checking her reflection like it might run away.”

Phei chuckled—low, dark, the sound rolling off the brushed-steel walls like distant thunder. He thumbed the button for floor 98.

“You know,” he said, glancing at the tiny void-black eyes hovering at shoulder height, “you make a pretty good assistant.”

Eira’s wings froze mid-flutter.

Then she pouted.

For a ten-thousand-year-old crystalline entity bonded to the most dangerous bloodline in recorded history, the pout was theatrical enough to win awards.

Lower lip trembling, tiny fists balled, wings drooping like wet laundry.

“Assistant,” she repeated, pronouncing the word as though it tasted of spoiled milk. “I am an ancient companion forged in the crucible of dying stars, and you have demoted me to… harem expansion manager.”

“My harem expansion manager,” Phei corrected, deadpan, “who treats my calendar like it’s the holy fucking grail.”

“Because you made it my top priority!” Her voice cracked with genuine outrage. “I could be manipulating void-space! Collapsing probabilities! Interfacing with realities you haven’t even conceptualised yet! Instead, I’m colour-coding your fuck appointments!”

“For now,” Phei said, shrugging, “harem expansion is my best interest. And you should do it better.”

Eira’s pout deepened into something almost tragic. Her wings gave an indignant buzz.

“Also,” he added, tone sliding colder, “don’t act so wronged. I know you’re keeping half the universe from me.”

The pout vanished.

Replaced by something far older—something that remembered agriculture was still a controversial new technology when it was already choosing its words with surgical care.

“That’s a given,” Eira said evenly. “I tell you nothing unless you ask directly or the situation demands it. The companion bond has limits. I’m not omniscient.” A tiny tilt of her wings. “But if you want… I can spy for you.”

Phei’s brows lifted.

“In that case,” he said, “no humility. Tell me the best intel you’ve got. Right now.”

Eira paused—wings humming, void-black eyes flicking upward the way they did when she was sifting through aeons of data, deciding what was safe, useful, or just entertaining enough to share.

“Harem-expansion-wise?” she asked.

“Harem-expansion-wise.”

A beat.

Then, clinically, like reading tomorrow’s weather:

“Daphne Whitmore—Maddie’s mother—is currently fingering herself to your video of you fucking Maddie and Sierra.”

Phei’s brain experienced a full, graceful blue-screen-of-death.

“She’s—what?”

“Daphne Whitmore. Maddie’s bedroom. Maddie’s tablet. Your encrypted folder—” Eira’s tone stayed perfectly neutral, like she was reporting stock prices. “Daphne is on her third glass of rosé and her second orgasm. Maddie is sitting right beside her. Eating crisps.”

Phei opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

“Maddie is right there while her mother—”

“Correct.”

“And Maddie’s just—”

“Eating salt-and-vinegar crisps. The packaging is very clear.”

Phei stared at the ceiling for a long second, letting the sheer black comedy of it sink in.

“Show me.”

A thin sheet of ice crystallised instantly between them—perfectly translucent, shimmering like liquid diamond.

The footage resolved in razor clarity:

Maddie’s bedroom.

Soft lamplight.

The tablet propped against a mountain of pillows.

Daphne Whitmore—silk loungewear rucked up to her hips, one hand buried between trembling thighs, the other clutching a wine stem—eyes glued to the screen where Phei was currently very deep in Sierra, cock glistening, Maddie’s ankles locked around his back while she wailed his name.

And Maddie herself—cross-legged on the bed in pyjama shorts and an oversized hoodie—calmly crunching crisps, eyes flicking between her phone and the live porn show starring her own mother.

She popped another crisp into her mouth.

Chewed.

Swallowed.

Then reached over without looking and topped up Daphne’s glass.

Phei was hard instantly.

Not the lazy, gradual swell of teenage hormones finally catching up. No slow creep of blood southward while the brain caught up with the visuals.

Instant. A full, brutal, Pavlovian kick straight to the cock—like someone had flipped a switch labelled immediate steel.

His gym pants went from comfortable to painfully tight in the space of one heartbeat, the thick ridge of him throbbing angrily against it as though personally offended that fabric still existed between it and the scene it had just witnessed.

Eira clicked her tiny crystalline teeth together in that precise, judgmental way only immortal fairies could manage.

“Horny,” she announced, flat as a weather report.

Phei barked a laugh—genuine, surprised, the kind that doubled him over slightly, one hand slapping the brushed-steel elevator wall for balance.

The ice screen shattered into harmless glittering motes as Eira dismissed it with an irritated flick of her wings.

“What the fuck did you expect?” he wheezed, still grinning like a lunatic. “I’m seventeen, watching one of my future mothers-in-law knuckle-deep in her own cunt to footage of me railing her daughter senseless—while said daughter sits cross-legged next to her, calmly crunching crisps and occasionally tilting the tablet for a better view of my cock splitting Sierra open.

“What reaction was I supposed to have? A thoughtful SAGE nod? A quiet moment of philosophical reflection on the decline of modern parenting?”

Eira gave the smallest, most grudging hum—the sound she made when she was forced to concede a point but refused to look happy about it.

“Fair enough,” she muttered.

The elevator climbed in soft, expensive silence. 78. 82. 85.

“Also,” Eira continued, wings settling into their crisp, professional cadence, “Emily has been detonating your phone.”

The grin faded—not into rage, but into the bone-deep, exhausted look of a man who’d been dodging the same persistent siege for days and had officially run out of polite synonyms for fuck off

.

“No.”

“She’s called fourteen times today. Sent—” Eira paused, doing that eerie internal tally thing she did “—thirty-seven texts. All concerning the offers.”

“No.”

“Some of them are quite generous—”

“No.” He said it slower this time, each syllable a nail in the coffin. “I’m not taking a single one of those yet.”

Emily Hartwell. His teenage assistant. The girl who four days ago had been limp and bleeding in his arms, pupils blown wide from whatever cocktail the Legacy princelings had pumped into her.

She’d woken up, patched herself together with sheer spite and competence, and immediately resumed her self-appointed role as the most ruthlessly efficient, most stubbornly persistent personal manager a seventeen-year-old war criminal had never requested.

She’d been hounding him since the morning after the sky-tearing. Calls. Texts. All because the world had collectively decided Phei was now interesting.

He wasn’t interested in being interesting on their terms.

“No,” he repeated as the elevator chimed softly and the doors parted onto floor 98. His floor. His three-story fuck-you penthouse.

His monument to the simple truth: I win.

He stepped out. Eira drifted beside him, crystalline wings catching the late-afternoon sun and throwing tiny rainbows across marble.

“For the rest of today,” he said, already crossing the living room toward the master suite, fingers working the buttons of his shirt, “and tonight—all of tonight—I’m focused on Patricia Bloom.”

Eira perked up instantly. The harem-expansion subroutine in her soul lit up like a casino slot machine hitting triple sevens.

“She’s been waiting since you promised to fuck her after the celebration but you did not after what happened at the club,” Eira confirmed. “She’s quite patiently, you know that, right?”

“She’s been starving for me, yet patient enough to not remind me the promise we had even when we talk or text,” Phei said.

He yanked the shirt over his head in one smooth motion and tossed it onto the sectional like it had personally offended him.

Bare torso gleamed under the golden light—muscle still faintly flushed from earlier exertions, the faint red marks of Amber’s nails still visible across his pecs.

“And tonight I’m going to feed her until she forgets what hunger feels like.”

He vanished into the bathroom. A second later the shower roared to life—cold water hammering Italian marble, steam from the sunken pool already curling under the door like smoke from a ritual about to begin.

Eira remained in the bedroom.

Alone.

She hovered there for a long moment, tiny crystalline body catching the sun, wings still.

Her void-black eyes drifted to the discarded shirt crumpled on the leather. To the closed bathroom door. To the city beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, glittering like it had been dipped in molten gold and handed to him on a platter.

Her face did something that—on a creature built of sharper, more human features—might have passed for a slow, wicked smile.

“Time to make the wait worthwhile,” she echoed softly to the empty penthouse.

Her wings gave a single, decisive hum.

She had work to do herself.