My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 855: The Cosmic Dragon’s Grand Plan

Cassiopeia’s side remained an absolute silence.

By now, that silence had become its own small creature inside Phei’s skull, sitting there with crossed legs and a smug little face, refusing to explain itself.

He checked again as he walked through the lobby of Infinity Chaos Hotel, not because he expected a different result, but because the human mind was a humiliating machine and apparently his had decided to develop a routine around waiting for Cassiopeia Maxton of all people.

’Cassiopeia.’

The thought alone almost made him laugh.

There had been a time, not even that long ago, when "worrying about Cassiopeia" somewhere between something akin to letting Harold give him life advice.

Yet here he was wondering why the woman had not reached out yet to report her mission results.

She would have loved it knowing he was thinking about her this much.

That made it slightly funnier. Not enough to help, but enough to keep the situation from becoming tragic, which was the emotional standard Phei had been reduced to lately. If his life did not actively burst into flames for fifteen consecutive minutes, he now considered that a peaceful morning.

The lobby stretched around him in polished marble, staff moved with trained elegance and bowed when they saw him. Guests spoke in lowered voices that dipped even lower when Phei passed, as if volume itself had developed manners in his presence.

Eyes followed him like usual...

Women glanced, then looked again, then pretended they had not looked at all with the fragile dignity of people whose thoughts had just tripped in public. Men measured him in the quick, bitter way men measured anything that made them feel suddenly underdesigned. Phones tilted slightly in his direction, their owners apparently convinced that subtlety meant holding the device like a dying bird while staring at him through the reflection of a vase.

Phei did not react.

At some point, being watched stopped feeling surprising and started feeling like weather. Irritating weather, expensive weather, weather with social media accounts and poor self-control, but weather nonetheless.

You did not become immune to it. You simply stopped giving every pair of eyes permission to touch you.

Emily walked near his side, composed enough to make the entire lobby seem under-qualified while Lydia drifted beside them with lazy elegance, looking like a spoiled noblewoman who had decided gravity deserved her cooperation for the next few minutes.

Catrina stayed close too... his PheiCrush Simps leaders were in fine form, then.

A ridiculous title and yet somehow, the women wore their roles with more discipline than most armies; together, they formed a living barrier of beauty, loyalty, and deeply questionable branding, they were the three represantatives of other Simps.

Phei should have been focusing on them.

Instead, his thoughts kept turning back to Cassiopeia.

But he refused to investigate that too deeply:

What gnawed at him were her missions and silence around it.

The fact that Cassiopeia had stepped back toward the poisonous heart of her own family with his command in her hands and a plan sharp enough to bleed anyone careless enough to touch it.

She was not merely running an errand. She was carrying one of the most dangerous threads currently moving through his life.

And Cassiopeia did not move like a normal subordinate.

She did not rush to prove herself and fill the air with useless reassurance.

Cassiopeia acted like a blade: quiet until impact, beautiful only if you were stupid enough to admire it from the wrong side.

That was why the silence bothered him.

Not because he doubted her.

Because he trusted her enough to understand that whatever she was doing, she was doing it properly.

Somewhere out there, behind walls built by old money and older grudges.

And then there was the other matter she held.

The woman from the plane.

That operation rested with Cassiopeia too, its steps arranged with the kind of cruel neatness that made Phei suspect she would have been terrifying even without power. Some people needed magic to become dangerous. Cassiopeia only needed access, silence, and a room full of people arrogant enough to underestimate her.

Was he relying on her too much?

The question came and died almost immediately.

No. If anything, the world had been inconsiderate enough to finally give him someone worth relying on. Cassiopeia could reach places he could not touch yet, slip through doors his presence would turn into alarms, and press pressure into corners where his name would arrive too loudly.

And also master did not throw every strike with his own hand. That was not power but poor delegation wearing masculine insecurity as cologne.

Cassiopeia was his shadow with teeth.

He would wait.

If something had gone wrong, he doubted the universe would remain this quiet. Cassiopeia failing silently felt impossible.

Until then, her silence meant the mission still breathed.

His mind shifted, unwillingly but naturally, to the rest of his women.

Melissa was the only one whose location he knew with any certainty. The others had scattered across Hell’s Paradise Island with the collective secrecy like they were planning something dangerous, romantic, expensive, or all three, which in Phei’s experience was simply called Tuesday.

As far as he knew even the other princesses had joined the quiet conspiracy, moving through the island with smiles too pretty to trust and intentions tucked beneath their lashes.

Most of them were already here.

Only Nastya was still incoming and Gianna Romano too, along with a few others whose arrivals had begun to gather at the edges of the day like storm clouds wearing perfume and private aviation.

Phei had not pressed for details.

When too many beautiful women became secretive at once, the safest response was patience, excellent posture, and emotional preparedness for disaster.

Preferably with wine nearby.

Victoria came to mind then.

Her bottle still waited for him, or at least it had been waiting before Consort arrived at his penthouse and politely murdered the evening’s original direction. Not that Phei regretted it.

Whatever had come from Consort’s visit was worth far more than any rare wine, even one gifted with Victoria’s careful desires.

...Victoria was plotting something.

Phei could feel it.

There was a new angle in her approach, a shift too subtle to name but too deliberate to ignore.

And Phei wanted to see how far she intended to take it.

The day stretched ahead of him, already crowded with too many arrivals and too many hidden blades.

Kyle had reached Paradise.

Jonathan too.

Roxanne’s arrival had been placed exactly where it needed to be: By tomorrow morning, no one would question her presence. She would simply be another person who was supposed to be there with her husband, and that was the cleanest kind of deception that did not need smoke, mirrors, or dramatic villain music.

Just timing and the blessed stupidity of people who only looked where they had been trained to look.

Phei had ordered the Montgomery patriarch had not gone to the family residence on Hell’s Paradise Island but instead stay at the hotel here.

Kyle had been brought with his family

Good.

Every person arriving on the island now had weight. Every public appearance, every private movement, every name entered into a hotel system or flight record or security file. The next few days were going to look, from the outside, like a convergence of wealthy families, dangerous bloodlines, and social obligations dressed in expensive clothes.

From the inside, it was something else entirely:

’A tightening wire like a room filling slowly with gas while the guests admired the curtains.’

And beneath all of it, through that cold private awareness he called Slave Sight, Phei knew exactly where the vampire Progenitor was.

The knowledge calmed him.

But his next few days here would be chaos.

Not the stupid kind, where things simply exploded because fools made noise and called it ambition. This would be curated chaos, designed chaos even; to look accidental only to people too arrogant to notice the knife entering between their ribs.

Arrivals would overlap. Smiles would conceal orders. Parties would hide negotiations:

Old enemies would step closer without realizing the floor beneath them had already been measured for their fall. Missions would move beneath luxury, beneath perfume, beneath laughter, beneath the soft clink of glasses held by people who believed the island still belonged to them.

That belief needed correction.

Phei walked on through the lobby, his CrushSimps beside him, strangers watching from every polished corner, and felt the future gathering around him like a storm that had learned manners.

Hell’s Paradise Island glittered above and below, obscene and beautiful, a paradise built by monsters for monsters.

The perfect place, really, to begin damaging the families who had spent generations mistaking survival for immortality.

Before he left this island, before the jet carried him home and Hell’s Paradise shrank behind him into a jewel of light on dark water, Phei intended to leave something behind:

Clean, visible, undeniable damage in these families.

The Legacy patriarchs had sat too long inside their names, wrapped in money, history, and the kind of family pride that turned men into furniture nobody dared throw away. They had grown comfortable. Worse, they had grown certain. Certain that their daughters could be used and killed off while their sons and progenitors could inherit rot, their enemies could be bought, and the world would keep bowing because it always had.

Phei wanted to hear that certainty crack.

Just once, for now.

One strike placed correctly.

One wound deep enough to make every old house feel the draft.

One nail driven into the coffin they had spent generations pretending was a throne.

The first nail.

The rest would follow.