My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 862: First Time as a Stalker

The first thing that genuinely caught Phei’s attention was not the stalker accusation itself.

No, it was the woman casually claiming the entire boutique had been closed off for her, as though that statement made complete sense on its own and required no further elaboration whatsoever.

As though buildings simply emptied themselves at her convenience and the universe considered this a reasonable allocation of resources.

Rich people did that sometimes, true, but usually there was at least paperwork, a bored assistant, and someone in a black suit pretending this was all perfectly normal instead of society quietly losing another moral battle.

Phei stood there with his wine glass still resting lazily between his fingers while the night wind swept across the rooftop, and for one brief, disoriented second, he almost wondered whether owner had somehow double-booked an entire luxury building for two completely different people by mistake.

Because unless Hell’s Paradise Island had suddenly started distributing closed-off designer boutiques like complimentary hotel mints, one of them was clearly misunderstanding something here.

The building had been emptied specifically for him and his crew.

Emily had arranged it; the absurdly expensive boutique below them currently sat deserted because some terrifyingly competent woman in glasses had decided that normal fitting experiences were beneath the Ryujin Tiamat heir and had apparently added "closing entire businesses for convenience" to her professional repertoire without consulting anyone about whether that was a proportionate response.

Knowing Emily, she probably had not even considered it dramatic, she had likely made one phone call, adjusted her glasses, and financially threatened reality until the boutique surrendered.

And this stranger...

This smoking, ridiculously beautiful stranger sitting comfortably on his rented rooftop while drinking from his rented rooftop bar...

Was speaking like the place belonged to her.

’Then she called me a stalker.’

That part almost made him laugh. Almost. Not because it annoyed him, because it was far too absurd to annoy, but because the accusation itself sounded so fundamentally deranged once directed at someone who looked like him that his brain genuinely required a moment to process the sheer architectural ambition of the audacity behind it:

There was confidence, there was delusion, and then there was accusing Phei Ryujin Tiamat of lurking around for female attention like some rejected man with a burner account, cheap cologne, and three unpaid parking tickets.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat.

A stalker?

Right!

Because obviously a man with this face needed to hide behind bushes and emotionally terrorize women for attention...

...Because clearly the amethyst-eyed heir to a bloodline older than most civilizations could not possibly find companionship through conventional means and had been reduced, by circumstance and desperation, to lurking on rooftops in designer clothes, hoping celebrities would mistake him for something worth talking to.

’Makes perfect sense.’ Phei thought sarcastically.

Honestly, had the woman actually looked at him before speaking?

The question genuinely crossed his mind as he turned toward her, amusement building somewhere beneath his ribs in slow, warm increments.

Phei was not arrogant enough to believe every woman alive should automatically collapse at his feet, that was a fantasy reserved for men with considerably less self-awareness and considerably worse taste, but at the same time, he possessed functioning eyes and a basic operational relationship with reality.

He knew what he looked like.

The world unfortunately kept reminding him every few hours, through stares, through stammering, and specific facial expression women made when their thoughts temporarily vacated their skulls and left a forwarding address that read currently unavailable due to unprecedented circumstances:

It was not vanity if society kept submitting witness statements.

At some point, a man had to accept the evidence.

And besides...

He already had the Ashford Madam.

Just thinking about that woman briefly made him understand why ancient emperors destroyed kingdoms over beauty and then wrote poetry afterward pretending the whole catastrophe had been politically necessary.

That goddess was already his: the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his entire life, full stop, no qualifications, no caveats.

Only someone like his Goddess could even tempt him into comprehending the mindset behind obsession, and even then he never would, because unlike emotionally damaged individuals prowling celebrity rooftops at midnight, Phei actually possessed dignity.

’Mostly... on good days.’

When nobody was testing him.

So yes, being accused of stalking by a stranger while holding wine under the moonlight was rapidly becoming one of the funniest things that had happened to him all week.

Which was saying a tremendous amount, considering his week had included making the Prince of Earth piss himself at brunch, acquiring a Primordial-rank artifact he could not activate, enslaving a Progenitor, and fleeing a fitting session because two women had gone to war over the emotional depth of the color black.

His life had become so stupidly luxurious and dangerous that therapy would have needed its own security team.

His life, lately, resembled a wealthy man’s fever dream directed by chaos itself. And this rooftop encounter was slotting comfortably into the program.

Honestly, if a camera crew had stepped out from behind the fire installation and announced this was all part of some elite reality show for supernatural heirs with attachment issues, Phei would have believed them.

He would have sued, obviously, but he would have believed them.

Still, the moment he properly looked at her, Phei understood immediately why weaker men probably lost their faculties around this woman.

Because her beauty was genuinely unreasonable:

She carried a face capable of ruining emotionally unstable men financially without lifting a finger, her beauty could indeed explain obsessive behavior from men.

Even sitting casually beneath the rooftop lights with a cigarette resting lazily between her fingers and irritation lingering across her expression like weather that had not decided whether to break or settle, she still looked sufficientlyunreal that Phei briefly understood why her brain had jumped directly to stalker instead of stranger.

Some women were beautiful in a way that made admiration feel natural; this one was beautiful in a way that made restraining orders feel historically inevitable.

From the exhausted confidence in that accusation alone, from the practiced, weary, deeply unsurprised way she had delivered it, she clearly dealt with this constantly rather than occasionally.

The accusation had not been panicked or startled, but more resigned. The verbal equivalent like she checking a box on a form she had filled out so many times she no longer read the questions.

And judging from the way her eyes occasionally flickered toward the darker corners of the rooftop despite her relaxed posture, quick, instinctive, barely conscious sweeps of the perimeter that a civilian would not have noticed.

But a man with Phei’s senses caught immediately; some of her stalkers had been influential enough to bypass privacy, security, and the basic conventions of human decency entirely.

Money made many men brave in the ugliest way while fame made them feel invited, beauty made them feel entitled:

Put all three together and society produced a creature that should have been studied under glass and then quietly removed from the ecosystem.

If Eira were here, if she were perched on his shoulder instead of lying unconscious in his penthouse, face-down in a pillow, paying the biological price for biting off more than her ancient mouth could chew;

...She would have laughed herself into respiratory failure before pointing out that this woman sounded so accustomed to being stalked that she no longer even bothered creating distance from suspicious men on rooftops.

Indeed, the woman had simply metabolized the threat into her daily routine and adjusted her conversational expectations accordingly.

Then Eira would have called him a romantic disaster with dragon packaging, which was rude, accurate, and therefore extremely annoying.

"...Yeah," Phei murmured, studying her properly now. "My heartstrings really have never been wrong."

The woman blinked.

Then, for the first time since arriving on the rooftop, she actually looked at him, not generally in his direction, not with the cursory glance of a woman assessing whether a threat was armed, but at him.

Her eyes found his face and stayed there, and the shift was immediate.

The dismissive irritation in her expression stumbled over something it had not expected to encounter.

"...Oh."