My Taboo Harem!

Cassiopeia’s expression, visible to him only through the curious reflection of her gaze flickering over his own cheek, contracted in gentle bewilderment.

From her perspective, her Master had just closed his eyes, opened them, stared at her for a half-second, and declared himself beautiful with the solemnity of a man discovering fire.

“Master—”

“No, seriously. Have I always looked like this? Because this is — this is —”

Phei moved his head a fraction, admiring the way Cassiopeia’s sight tracked the motion, the way the cheekbone caught the pale light like carved marble, the way the jawline did the thing jawlines were supposed to do but had never quite done on him before the awakening.

“This is obscene. This is unreasonable. No wonder I have women rolling with me. Who the hell could resist a man who looks this good? I’d throw myself at me in a broom cupboard.”

Cassiopeia’s sight, which he was using to see himself, blinked several times.

“Cassiopeia,” Phei said, delighted now, voice dripping with narcissistic awe, “is this why you couldn’t resist me? Tell the truth. Look at this face. This is the face of a man you throw yourself at in broom cupboards. This is the face of — look at my nose. Look at the bridge of my nose. This nose has its own lawyer. These lips? These are lips that start wars and end them with a smirk.”

Cassiopeia’s sight rolled. Literally rolled. Her eyes rolling upward in the universal gesture of a woman refusing to dignify a comment, and Phei saw it happen from the inside, the pale ceiling of his own obscenely white bedroom rising into view as her gaze travelled skyward.

“Master.”

Her sight briefly pivoted to examine his lips, involuntarily, and Phei caught her in the act.

“Cassiopeia.”

“Shut up, Master… I am admiring a masterpiece.”

A small crystalline voice arrived, entirely uninvited, dripping with amusement.

“Now you understand, master, why I have to sneak and peek whenever you’re undressed.”

Phei’s eyes — or rather, Cassiopeia’s eyes, rotated in the direction of the window where Eira was hovering — pivoted.

Eira was hovering in the middle of the air, wings fluttering slow, one small hand pressed theatrically to her translucent cheek.

Of course, Cassiopeia couldn’t see Eira, but Phei could, his sight had been divided into his own (what he saw) and Cassiopeia’s (what she was seeing) and Eira wasn’t one of them but her Master talking to space.

Looking at himself talking to space, looked rather stupid.

“You perverted little—”

“A full unveiling,” Eira said brightly, “would settle the question completely. Really, Master. A proper survey. You haven’t truly appreciated yourself until you’ve seen yourself in your full unclothed glory through a borrowed perspective. Allow me.”

She fluttered forward with obvious intent toward his waistband.

Phei’s body — which, he discovered, he could control perfectly well despite seeing through Cassiopeia’s eyes, a flawless seamless dual-operation that any normal nervous system would have wept at being asked to perform — thwarted her hand away with a swat.

Eira was within three inches of the Maxton woman’s field of view but Cassiopeia’s sight refused to register her existence.

The fairy giggled. Dodged his swat. Circled.

“Distance doesn’t matter, master. I can undress you from here. Want to see?”

“I dare you, pervert.”

“Careful, master. A dare is a contract.”

“Try me!”

Eira’s tiny eyes glittered.

Phei watched her begin to raise both small hands in elegant threat — and remembered, in the same moment, that Cassiopeia was still staring at him.

Or rather, he too was staring at himself.

Staring hard.

Her expression, visible to him from inside his own perspective, had resolved from bewildered to openly confused. Her lips had parted, eyebrows had drawn together.

Her hand, which she had been pressing against her mouth to stifle the residual laughter, had drifted down to her collarbone in the unconscious gesture of a woman trying to work out whether the man she served was having a psychotic episode.

“Master.”

Her voice was careful.

“Yes, Cassiopeia.”

“Master — you’ve been doing this for days now.”

“Doing what.”

“Talking to nothing with no words coming out. Sometimes laughing. Once in the car, your lips move for nearly two minutes without sound. And just now you swatted at your own shoulder as if there was a fly, and there wasn’t a fly. And now you’re — are you — is there —”

She trailed off, unwilling to say are you losing your mind to the Cosmic Dragon who had just returned from enslaving an Original Progenitor.

Phei laughed properly, throwing his head back with the rich, unrestrained delight of a seventeen-year-old Cosmic Dragon who had just remembered how unfairly magnificent his own reflection looked mid-mirth, his amethyst eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that would have made statues weep with envy.

From Cassiopeia’s perspective — which he was still luxuriating in like a private VIP box seat to his own divine features — her master shifted in an instant from invisible conversation to howling amusement at her confusion, and Phei noted with pure narcissistic pleasure how perfectly her long lashes framed the view of his own face, how the angle turned every line of his jaw into something carved by envious gods.

It was, he decided, an exceptionally attractive vantage point for admiring himself from inside someone else’s eyes.

“I’m not talking to myself, Cassiopeia,” he said, still chuckling as he pointed directly at the hovering fairy who had frozen mid-undressing gesture, regarding the unfolding chaos with the theatrical interest of a tiny immortal who lived for this exact brand of domestic disaster.

In that precise moment his finger aligned with Eira’s form, the world obliged with a seamless little shift.

“I am talking to that perverted fool!”

Cassiopeia’s sight caught it first: the translucent fairy suddenly rendered visible, wings fluttering lazily, one hand cocked on her hip, dark-diamond eyes glittering like she had been waiting for an audience all along.

Cassiopeia made a small, high, thin sound — the delicate squeak as her capacity for shock had been stretched well beyond its elegant specifications.

“Is that a fairy,” she managed, voice barely above a whisper.

“She’s a pain, is what she is,” Phei replied smoothly, still riding the high of his own beauty reflected back at him through her gaze.

Eira’s mental voice slid into both their heads at once, crisp and delighted. “I am a sovereign Void-Ice elemental bound to your master’s service, Cassiopeia Maxton. Oh, also, I know extremely uncomfortable things about you.”

Cassiopeia’s sight jerked wide.

“Master,” Eira continued with saccharine sweetness, “who watches over me in the shower, for instance—”

“Eira.”

“—and who sometimes whispers my—”

“Eira.”

Cassiopeia turned her head very slowly to face him directly, which meant Phei was now treated to an even more breathtaking close-up of his own body through her eyes — broader shoulders than he had realised, the way the dim light kissed the line of his throat like a lover who knew its job.

No wonder women he didn’t even know kept throwing themselves at him; the universe simply had impeccable taste.

“Master,” Cassiopeia said carefully, “does this fairy know things about me?”

“She knows things about everyone. She’s in your head right now.”

“Get out of my head.”

“No.”

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD, INSECT.”

What was Cassiopeia even doing? Nevertheless, less crowd, he could now focus on other things.

Phei simply closed his eyes from within her perspective and left the two of them to their delightful little war, the Slave Sight humming like a perfectly tuned instrument in the back of his mind.

It was a marvel — whoever he wished to observe became instantly observable, and extending it to Cassiopeia had not only let him admire himself from inside her lovely long-lashed view but had also gifted her the ability to see Eira, since the fairy’s invisibility was less an ability and more a cosmic default setting that Phei could override with a casual flex of attention.

Now that Cassiopeia was inside the loop, she would keep seeing the little pervert until he revoked the privilege or Eira drifted out of range.

And the best part, the part that sent a quiet thrill of dark satisfaction curling through him, was discovering that Slave Sight worked across distance just as effortlessly as it worked up close.

He reached experimentally;

For Kyle.

His face went very still in the middle of that blindingly white bedroom while Cassiopeia and Eira continued their escalating rant in the background.

Then it twitched. Then the colour began to drain from it with the slow, dignified horror of a god who had just opened the wrong cosmic door.

Kyle had indeed been released that morning exactly as they’d predicted — morning light pouring through tall narrow windows, expensive curtains swept aside, pale marble floors gleaming in what was clearly some Abrams-Manson penthouse or estate somewhere in Paradise.

Legal wheels had spun at supernatural speed: evidence vanished, charges evaporated, palms greased with seven figures, the federal cell door swinging open at 9:47 a.m. while Kyle strolled out with that same patrician poise of a man who had never truly been inconvenienced in his immortal life.

Phei and Eira knew with death of Morrison, Kyle would be released the next day, so they had to act before that happened.

The Mark had taken long before any of that.