My Taboo Harem!

Phei, the dragon of elegant ruin, gestured with the languid precision of a maestro conducting his own requiem.

Cassiopeia’s dark eyes flickered — a solitary scintilla of infernal comprehension igniting in their obsidian depths — and she crossed the living room to him in four slow, unhurried steps. The silk robe, that treacherous whisper, rustled against the bare tops of her thighs like the wings of a dying moth, each movement a deliberate flirtation with indecency.

Phei admired it briefly as an engineering feat of such sublime absurdity that it rivalled their own entanglement: ‘a fragile tower of deceit balanced on the knife-edge of desire, defying gravity, propriety, and good sense with equal contempt.’

When she reached him, she lowered herself onto the couch beside him with fluid ease — she had, several days ago, solved the eternal riddle of how to sit beside this particular man on this particular couch without permitting the robe to stage a most mortifying coup d’état; the solution, of course, was to simply let it misbehave with the shameless enthusiasm of a courtesan at her own funeral.

She tucked one bare leg under her. The hem of the robe rode up but she did not adjust it.

Phei’s hand slid, out of pure conditioned reflex, onto the bare warmth of her thigh, and his mind supplied the dark punchline: ‘How ironic — the hand that will one day sign her family’s death warrant finds such innocent comfort in the heat of her skin.’

She leaned slightly into his palm and pressed Accept and thumbed the speaker on with the cold efficiency of an assassin priming the trigger.

She held the phone between them.

“Cassiopeia.”

Harold Maxton’s voice came through the speaker flat and clipped—

Phei could feel on the other side of the call, the faint, almost imperceptible echo of a large study — carpeted, book-lined, expensive — and the equally faint, equally imperceptible chorus of other men breathing quietly at a tactical distance from the phone, like vultures politely waiting for the corpse to stop twitching.

Phei counted the breaths with the meticulous glee of a hangman inventorying his ropes. Four men, if he was being generous. Two and then plus Harold, if he was being strict — and strictness, in this theatre of shadows, was the only religion worth practising.

Cassiopeia’s voice arrived in the same professional register.

“Harold. You’re calling late… I am supposed to be sleeping you, know.”

“I’m calling on time. You’ve been on the ground for days and I haven’t had a report.”

“I was in the shower.”

“How convenient.”

“Not particularly. Hygiene exists, brother. What do you need?”

Phei’s thumb traced a slow, lazy arc along the soft inside of her thigh, each caress a silent hymn to the grotesque comedy unfolding.

The dutiful sister was reporting to the family cabal while the target of their fondest homicide fantasies mapped the geography of her leg with fingers that could just as easily close around her throat.

Cassiopeia’s breath caught, very slightly, in her throat.

She covered it with a small, cold laugh —

“The arrangements, Cassiopeia. The arrangements. Have they — ah — gone according to plan.”

“They’ve gone better than planned.”

A brief silence.

Three breathing patterns sharpened on the other end, the way three patterns always did when three men simultaneously realised that a briefing was about to contain information worth writing down — or, more accurately, worth carving onto Phei’s eventual tombstone.

Cassiopeia glanced at Phei.

Phei tilted his head two degrees and mouthed, silently: Go.

She went.

“He trusts me, Harold.” Her voice stayed flat. “It took less effort than we expected. He responded to the aunt angle beautifully. I think he’s been starved for that particular dynamic for a very long time. He lost his mother young, as you’re aware, and everything about the way he’s responding to me maps onto that very cleanly. He’s affectionate. He’s attentive. He’s protective. In the way boys are protective of women they’ve cast in a certain role in their heads.”

A slow exhale from Harold. “Useful.”

“Very.”

Phei’s hand kept moving, slow, patient. He was watching her face.

She did not break or flicker. Her eyes held his with the flat, amused professionalism and the fondness in her chest deepened a full notch.

She was good. Genuinely, disturbingly good at this. Phei made a very private mental note to remember that his Marked woman had three decades of Legacy performance training in her, and was, apparently, willing to deploy every ounce of it in his service—

“He talks to me about things he doesn’t tell the others,” Cassiopeia continued. “Feelings he doesn’t share with Sierra or his other women. Worries he keeps from Melissa. Small fears I don’t think he’s ever put into words before. He’s—” a beat “—lonely at the centre of all of this, Harold. A dozen women around him and none of them see him the way he believes I do. That’s the crack. That’s the one I’ve been widening.”

‘Lonely at the centre?’ Phei smiled. ‘How quaintly tragic. How exquisitely false. In this precise instant I am surrounded by the ghosts of her family’s ambitions, yet I have never felt less alone. The crack she widens? It is the very fissure through which my own plans will slither, unseen like hot knife in tofu. The irony would choke a lesser man. Fortunately, I have an excellent sense of humour.’

“And the other women?”

“They like me. I’m careful with them. Respectful. The aunt they wish they’d had. Sierra has started asking my advice on things. Valentina has told me she trusts me with her life. Maddie invited me to do her hair this morning. They have, collectively, no idea that I’m reporting every word of this back to you.”

A low, admiring laugh from somewhere not Harold’s mouth — her father’s specific rasp, who strangely sounded like a man who had sold his soul and received excellent terms.

‘So. Three confirmed. Harold. Her father. And one more.’ Phei had a guess who the third was — and the guess tasted of cold iron and older grudges.

“And him, Cassiopeia?” Harold’s voice tightened the screw. “The boy himself. How close is he to — let us say — unguarded?”

Cassiopeia hesitated.

It was a masterful hesitation.

Phei could feel the three men on the other end of the line leaning forward like hyenas scenting weakness — or perhaps their own impending farce. The absurdity was almost erotic.

“Close, Harold,” she said, quietly. “Very close. He has been exceptionally affectionate tonight. More than usual. He asked me to stay in his suite while his women are in other penthouses.”

Harold’s inhale was sharp. Then — carefully, because he was speaking to a sister he did not trust and had not trusted since they were both children — he recalibrated.

“Are you — Cassiopeia, are you with him right now?”

“I am. I stepped out to shower. He’s in the next room waiting for me. I picked up because I saw it was you… you do not know how to pick moments, do you?”

There was a pause.

Phei could practically hear Harold weighing whether to say “good girl” and deciding, against his own instincts, that the phrase would land with the grace of a brick through a stained-glass window.

Some endearments, even in the Maxton family, were best left to rot in the family crypt.

He settled for something colder.

“Excellent work.”

“Mm.”

“I mean that.”

“Write it down for me. I’ll frame it. I do not care, fool.”

The third breather on the other end of the line cleared his throat, and the voice that followed confirmed Phei’s guess in full.

“Cassiopeia.” The man’s tone was smooth. Lazy, smooth and cold underneath the smoothness. “Well done. Truly. Keep doing exactly what you are doing.”

“Thank you, my Prince.”

“Do not rush him. Do not force anything. Let him come to you. Every small intimacy you earn makes the moment we eventually ask you to execute easier. You have all the time in the world, sweetheart.”

“I understand.”

“Does he speak about any of us? By name? In any way at all?”

Cassiopeia’s eyes flickered to Phei.

Phei, still playing his part of the silent hand stroking her thigh, gave her the smallest, most patient nod. “Give them something. Small. True-ish. Let them feel like they’re earning something — the better to lull them into the false security that precedes the most exquisite of falls.”

“He mentioned Marcus Heavenchild once,” she said, carefully. “That he was — something ancient. A reincarnation.”

A ripple of quiet satisfaction went through the three men.

“Good,” Danton purred, the syllables with anticipation. “Excellent, sweetheart. That tells us the intelligence is flowing in his direction but slowly. He doesn’t have the full picture yet. Which means we are still ahead of the curve.”