My Taboo Harem!

Anderson Price felt his stomach tilt after his sister’s words.

Not literally. Or not only literally but even the scar on his face — the long, vertical line that split his forehead from hairline to chin — pulsed once with the dull throb it produced whenever his blood pressure climbed.

He stared.

Across the lobby, Phei was being received like a god.

Not a metaphor. Like a god.

Every staff member he passed was bowing. Not the customer-service nod that a seven-star hotel gave to a high-roller. Real bows. Spine bent. Heads dropped.

The welcome a feudal court reserved for a returning prince.

And Phei was walking through it casually, loose and easy, half-laughing at something Maddie had just whispered to him.

“He’s done nothing to deserve what was happening around him and is somehow completely entitled to it anyway.’ Anderson’s hands flexed. ‘The charity case.’

The boy whose lunch money Anderson had personally taken for years and he bet on fifty dollars and the satisfaction of watching him try not to cry.

That boy was now being addressed as Young Master by an international hotel chain in a property that belonged, apparently, to his family — which was apparently larger than the Natsuki firm, larger than any Legacy Family fortune like Heavenchilds, larger than anything the Legacy network had ever bothered to map because the Legacy network had been too busy congratulating itself on its own importance to notice.

And the women.

Christ, the women.

Sierra Montgomery, the Hell Bitch Queen, who had not spoken voluntarily to a Legacy boy but Marcus in three years, because she’d been raised to revere him, was holding Phei’s hand.

No, not just holding it — interlacing fingers, thumb stroking the back of his hand, leaning into his shoulder like she belonged there. Maddie Whitmore was bouncing next to him, gesturing wildly at the lobby ceiling, her whole body radiating an unfiltered joy Anderson had not seen on a Legacy princess’s face in his entire conscious life.

Elena Ashford was laughing. Laughing. The Virgin Succubus was whispering something into his ear right after Maddie, that made him grin at her, and the look she was giving him in return was —

Was—

Anderson’s eyes flicked sideways, hunting for any face that wasn’t twisted with happiness around the dragon, and instead met Maddie Whitmore’s directly.

She had clocked him.

She raised her hand.

She gave him the middle finger.

Slow. Deliberate. Eyes locked on his. Then — because Maddie Whitmore did this to every Legacy boy without exception, including Marcus Heavenchild himself, having decided long ago that she would die before she pretended to respect any of them — she lowered the finger and replaced it with a slow, theatrical Scarface gesture across her own face.

A single index finger drawn deliberately from forehead to chin, mirroring the exact line of the scar bisecting his.

Anderson looked away.

His jaw locked so hard his molars creaked.

He kept hunting. Looking for any face in that crowd that wasn’t part of the dragon’s collection. Looking, instead, for confirmation that this was a small operation. A handful of girls. Manageable. Containable.

He found Amber Castellano.

Brett’s sister — daughter of the most powerful shipping families on the planet — laughing at something Yuki Tanaka, as Yuki gestured with both hands at her own phone screen. Yuki Tanaka. Tanaka Technologies.

Whose family bowed to Melissa Maxton in private and now, Anderson realised with a dull cold drop in his stomach.

According to Danton, the Tanakas had been bending the knee to this family for years and had simply never told anyone.

Then there was Landon — somebody Anderson barely knew, peripheral — with his arm around a stunning brunette who was looking up at him like he was the sun.

And Brian, the loud one, hauling a suitcase for a flight attendant whose airline-issue shoes had been kicked off and replaced with a pair of his own black socks because—

Anderson did not want to know why.

He really did not want to know what had led to that.

Even they were happy.

Every single body in Phei’s orbit was happy.

And meanwhile —

Anderson’s thoughts catalogued, against his will, the state of his own ledger.

The Circle of Cowards. Brett, broken and blackmailed. Aiden Collins, jumpy and twitching every time a phone rang. Derek Roth-Fairchild, paying out somewhere in the seven figures weekly to a certain woman to keep something she knew about from reaching the wrong inbox.

Zack Preston, whose family was already discreetly redirecting trust fund disbursements because of that incident. Kyle Abrams-Manson — Kyle, who used to break Phei’s ribs for fun in the Ashford locker room — was sitting in a federal prison.

Danton was off doing whatever Danton was doing. Marcus had silver eyes, a perfect face, and a body that hadn’t been able to function in months. Anderson himself had a permanent scar.

What was their crew, then? What did they have to show for it?

Manhoods crippled. Cowering and hiding. Wounds that would never heal. Their fellow in prison.

And the reason — the reason — for all of it was the smiling boy walking past the marble columns with five women hanging off him and an entourage that looked like a wedding party, on his way to a penthouse suite in a hotel his family secretly owned.

Anderson’s hands stopped flexing.

His jaw unlocked.

something colder and sharper than mere rage settled behind his eyes — a quiet, crystalline certainty.

‘We should have killed him when we still could,’ he thought, the realization tasting of iron and ashes. ‘Before the dragon learned how to breathe fire.’

His mouth twisted into a small, tight smile — the kind a man wears when he believes the universe has finally remembered to balance the scales.

Just you wait.

The thought settled in the back of his skull like a coin dropped into a deep, echoing well — calm, deliberate, almost peaceful.

Just you wait, dragon.

Danton was ready. Marcus was healing. The plan was already in motion, its gears turning in perfect, unseen silence.

Phei thought he had already won. He thought these women were his now. He thought walking through this lobby while the hotel bowed and the staff chanted Young Master somehow rendered him untouchable.

Just you wait.

We are coming.

Beside him, Evan — who had spent the entire exchange picking absently at his cuff and contributing precisely nothing to the family’s strategic recalibration — finally squinted at the tableau unfolding across the lobby.

“Wait,” he said, voice flat with genuine confusion. “Is that… is that Cassiopeia Maxton?”

Three heads — Fenris, Abigail, and Anderson — turned in perfect unison.

Cassiopeia was indeed moving with the group, toward the rear. One hand clasped Patricia Bloom’s the other Valentina’s, the three of them swinging their joined hands with light, almost playful affection as they drifted toward the elevator bank.

She was smiling — a warm, genuine curve of the lips that radiated maternal tenderness so convincingly that even Anderson, who had grown up steeped in the performative vocabularies of Maxton women, almost believed the act.

“What is a Maxton doing,” Evan continued, louder now, “walking hand-in-hand with the boy and the women who publicly humiliated her own brother?”

No one answered him.

Fenris’s grey eyes narrowed, calculating. Abigail watched Cassiopeia with the absolute stillness of a predator deciding which existing model of reality to shatter first.

Anderson, however, smiled wider.

Genuine this time. Real.

Because Anderson knew exactly what Cassiopeia Maxton was doing in that little procession. Or rather, he believed he knew with crystalline certainty. Danton had briefed him personally three weeks earlier, in a sealed room far from prying ears.

‘Danton’s aunt is on mission. Sweetest face. Sweetest voice. Closest to the target without raising a whisper of suspicion. She’ll get him alone when the time is right, and she’ll deliver him straight into our hands.’

Anderson watched her now — laughing softly at something Valentina said, tucking a stray strand of Sierra’s hair behind her ear with casual, maternal intimacy, as though she had loved these girls her entire life.

Beautiful, he thought, the word tasting like victory on his tongue. ‘Beautiful work, Cassiopeia. Play the devoted aunt. Play it flawlessly. Play it so perfectly that the dragon never sees a single seam in the performance.’

‘And when the moment arrives — when Danton gives the signal, when the trap is sprung, when the hotel staff are out of earshot and the women are asleep and the boy is finally alone with the one woman he trusts most in the world — you will do exactly what you were sent here to do.’

His smile deepened by another fraction.

‘You deliver that arrogant little motherfucker to us.’

The elevator chimed open across the lobby with a soft, golden note. Phei gestured the women inside first. Sierra stepped in with Valentina. Cassiopeia followed, casting one last warm, lingering glance back at Phei before disappearing into the elevator.

Phei smiled at her — soft, intimate, trusting without reservation — the kind of smile that said he would place his life in her hands without a second thought.

Anderson watched that smile.

And in the quiet recesses of his mind, very softly, with the absolute certainty he needed to keep his worldview from fracturing entirely —

Soon, dragon.

Soon she delivers you to us.

And then we’ll see who walks out of an elevator like he owns the building.