My Taboo Harem!

Phei’s mouth hung open.

Not the calculated stillness he usually wore like armor—the careful composure of a boy who had learned to hide every weakness from predators who circled constantly, waiting for the slightest flicker of vulnerability.

This was raw, unguarded shock: the slack-jawed bewilderment of a man who had believed he understood the game, only to discover the board possessed thirty more unseen dimensions than he had ever imagined.

“It’s—” He stopped. Tried again. “It’s—”

The words refused him entirely. Too many implications crashed through his mind like dominoes toppling in patterns too complex to track.

Bloodlines that devoured one another. Children who died screaming as their own heritage ripped them apart from the inside out. Generations of meticulous breeding engineered to safeguard supernatural dynasties that had ruled from the shadows since before history was written.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” The admission burned like ash on his tongue. “How does any of this connect to the girls dying? What does the Destined Day have to do with Sierra—with any of them?”

Roxanne shook her head slowly. Her hair swayed with the motion, catching the frost-light that gleamed off the Void-Ice shroud still sealing them in crystalline isolation. Her voluptuous frame trembled beneath the champagne silk of her robe—not from cold, but from the crushing weight of secrets she had carried for two decades, secrets that now demanded to be released.

“It has everything to do with that stupid cursed day.”

She drew a steadying breath of the pure terror coiled deep in her marrow.

“I’ve been married into a Legacy family for twenty years,” she said quietly. “Twenty years of watching. Learning. Understanding the hidden machinery that most people—even most Legacies—never glimpse. The mothers of this current young generation… we talk. We share what our husbands refuse to tell us and what the patriarchs believe we are too fragile to bear.”

Her hands twisted in her lap, knuckles bleaching white against the silk pooled around her trembling thighs.

“Unlike every generation that came before—unlike the generation of Damien Ashford and Jonathan and Harold and all the other current patriarchs—none of the Legacy heirs of this generation have married into other Legacy families. All the rumors of organized arranged marriages are a lie they tell their kids and everyone else to mask the truth only a few know.”

She met his eyes and held them with the desperate intensity of a woman finally unburdening a truth that had been crushing her for years.

“Because of the Destined Day.”

Phei’s mind raced, threading connections he hadn’t known existed.

“This is the last generation before that day arrives,” Roxanne continued, her voice dropping to a bare whisper. “The final generation before the powers and bloodlines that have lain dormant in every Legacy family finally awaken—yes that’s why they call themselves Dormants—because for centuries, for millennia, the supernatural heritage in their veins has slumbered. Waiting. Building. Preparing for the moment it would stir to full wakefulness.”

She leaned forward. Her lush curves shifted beneath the champagne silk, the shadowed valley between her breasts catching the frost-light as she closed the distance between them.

“None of the main Legacy families could risk intermarriage in this generation. None of them could afford to produce an heir who might claim the other family’s bloodline instead of their own. Because this generation—” her voice cracked “—this generation will be different.”

Understanding bloomed cold and sharp in Phei’s chest, like frost flowers spreading across glass.

The current young generation. The heirs and heiresses of every major Legacy family in Paradise. Marcus Heavenchild. Danton Maxton. Elena Ashford. Sierra Montgomery. All of them.

They were not merely the next link in ancient chains of succession.

They were the culmination.

“When the Destined Day comes,” he said slowly, testing the shape of the revelation against everything he already knew, “the entire families will awaken their powers. Their bloodlines. The dormant heritage that’s been accumulating for generations.”

Roxanne nodded, tears gathering at the corners of her green eyes.

“But the heirs of this generation—the last generation born when the Destined Day is destined to be happening… when these kids awaken—they won’t just receive the same powers as everyone else from their families. They’ll be…” He searched for the word. “More purer and stronger. Three times stronger. Five times. The most potent concentrated, strongest of their bloodline that has ever existed. And that gap would only widen as they go on.”

“The most powerful beings their bloodlines have ever produced,” Roxanne confirmed, her voice hollow with the sheer enormity of it. “Each one destined to become the Supreme Ruler of their entire family and Bloodline. Not merely patriarchs or matriarchs—sovereigns. Beings so powerful that the previous generations will seem like candles held up against the sun.”

Phei now understood why the intermarriage ban had been absolute for this generation.

If two Legacy heirs married—if Elena Ashford wed Marcus Heavenchild, (would never happen but for example)—the child they produced would either become a cripple who died during the awakening or would carry only one family’s bloodline. Either the Ashfords would lose their most powerful heir, or the Heavenchilds would.

And in a world transformed by the Destined Day—where every Legacy would awaken into a supernatural force—losing your strongest heir to another bloodline meant being consumed by the families who had kept theirs.

Extinction. Absorption. The slow death of a dynasty that had endured for millennia, unraveled by a single marriage contract signed in the wrong generation.

No wonder every patriarch of the previous generation had married outside Paradise. No wonder they had chosen non-Legacy spouses with the cold precision of generals selecting battlegrounds.

No wonder the current mothers—Roxanne and her peers—had been brought in from the outside, their mundane bloodlines guaranteed to yield entirely before Legacy supremacy.

It was survival. Pure, brutal, and absolute.

Yet even as the logic locked into place, Phei found himself circling back to the question Roxanne had still not answered.

The girls.

Elena. Sierra. Maddie. Jade. Natasha. Clara. Yuki. Priya. Juliette.

The sole daughters. The only children. The princesses born alone into families that had prayed for sons and received instead a single fragile vessel to carry every last hope.

He understood now why they could not marry other Legacy heirs—the mathematics made that impossible without sacrificing their families’ futures. He understood why their fathers had chosen non-Legacy mothers, ensuring the children would be pure expressions of the paternal bloodline.

But he still could not see what would kill them.

Why would being the sole daughter of a Legacy family be a death sentence? The bloodline rules did not care about gender—daughters carried the same heritage as sons, could pass it on with the same certainty, and would awaken with the same terrible potency when the Destined Day arrived.

What am I missing?

What final piece of the puzzle remained hidden?

“I can see you’re still confused.”

Roxanne’s voice sliced through his spiraling thoughts. She watched him with an expression that mingled desperate hope and exhaustion—the face of a mother who had carried the knowledge of her daughter’s doom for years and had finally found someone she believed might alter the outcome.

She straightened on the edge of Sierra’s bed. Her voluptuous frame drew taut beneath the champagne silk, her trembling stilled by the sheer force of will it took to speak what came next.

The dress had slipped farther down one alabaster shoulder, revealing the graceful line of her collarbone and the upper swell of breasts that had once nursed the daughter she was now fighting desperately to save.

“Let me explain about the real meaning of Legacy families.”

Her green eyes burned with an intensity that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with maternal desperation.

“Let me tell you why these families cannot afford female last-generation heirs.”