My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 863: Handsome Stalker

Phei smiled faintly.

There it was.

Recognition.

Not of his name or of the absurd inheritance sitting behind him like a sleeping dragon made of money, violence, and family trauma.

Just recognition of the simple observable fact that the man standing before her with a wine glass and amethyst eyes did not, by any available metric, resemble a person who needed to stalk women for attention.

Maybe she did not know him specifically, which made sense. Despite his increasingly ridiculous existence, the entire world was not obsessively tracking his face yet:

But between the appearance, the clothes, the posture, and the effortless young-master gravity wrapped around him like generational wealth made physical, there was absolutely no honest reading of this situation in which he resembled a desperate rooftop predator surviving on celebrity delusions and parasocial illness.

He looked more like the kind of man other men accused of ruining their relationships by simply entering the same room and breathing irresponsibly.

’After all, I literally am a young master,’ Phei thought, shamelessly, without a trace of guilt, because some truths did not require modesty, and this was emphatically one of them.

False humility was just lying with better lighting.

The woman narrowed her eyes slightly around the cigarette resting between her fingers before suddenly smiling. A real smile this time, amused and disbelieving, the expression arriving on her face like sunlight breaking through a cloud that had been sitting there for hours.

"You’re by far the most handsome stalker I’ve ever seen."

Phei almost laughed out loud.

Almost.

But then he noticed something else.

Something beneath the amusement, hidden deep inside her eyes in a way most men would have missed entirely because most men were too busy being flattered to read the rest of the sentence.

’Disgust.’

Quiet. Old and settled in but it was not aimed at him specifically, but at the category he had been placed in, the entire species of man who showed up uninvited in private spaces and believed their appearance, wealth, name, or fanatical devotion exempted them from the basic requirement of being invited.

The disgust lived beneath her smile the way scar tissue lived beneath healed skin, invisible unless you knew to look, permanent once you found it.

And that changed the entire temperature of the conversation for him.

Because suddenly it stopped sounding like playful banter and started sounding like exhausted experience she’d been subjected to her entire life...

No matter how handsome or wealthy someone was, stalkers remained repulsive to the people forced to endure them.

’Beauty does not magically launder obsession into romance once fear had entered the equation.’

Nothing did. That was the part those idiots never understood. They thought proximity was passion, persistence was devotion, and violation was somehow romantic if they suffered loudly enough while doing it.

As if making a woman afraid was just flirting with worse branding.

"Hey, lady," Phei said, and the amusement had cooled in his voice now, replaced by something closer to genuine offense, not wounded pride, but the specific irritation of being mistaken for a something he found contemptible.

"That’s rude as hell. You can’t just accuse people of—"

"Lady?" she interrupted.

Then burst out laughing and not even the curated, camera-ready kind that beautiful women in public spaces deployed like currency; it was a genuinely disbelieving laugh that escaped before image management could catch it, like she had just heard something so unexpected that her composure lost its grip for a full second and let the real sound through.

It made the rooftop feel less staged for a heartbeat, less expensive, less cold.

Just a woman laughing under the moon because a stranger had somehow offended her celebrity ego by being socially clueless in the cleanest way possible.

"What is this now?" she asked, leaning back into the couch cushions, cigarette smoke curling softly around her face beneath the rooftop lights.

"Is this new strategy among stalkers new to pretend you don’t recognize who I am just to get my attention?"

Phei blinked; eyelids closing and opening in the universal human expression ofI’m sorry, what?

"...What?"

"Oh, come on," she continued, gesturing lazily toward him with her cigarette, trailing smoke through the cold air between them.

"What do you want? An autograph? A picture? Should I sign your shirt?" She took a drag and exhaled. "Better yet, let me sign your body directly, since apparently personal boundaries don’t exist anymore."

Despite the sarcasm and irritation threading through her voice, Phei noticed something else immediately.

She kept glancing around again in quick peripheral sweeps of the rooftop’s darker edges; a scanning maybe she’d developed after years of expecting unwanted eyes, around corners and hidden cameras inside silence itself.

Even while talking, while smoking, while delivering barbed one-liners with the practiced exhaustion of a woman who had turned self-defense into a conversational style, part of her attention remained elsewhere.

Watching.

Checking.

The alertness of someone who had learned, through repetition and violation, that relaxation was a luxury she could perform but never actually afford.

She sat like someone resting, but her eyes worked like security cameras with trauma attached:

’The ugly magic of fame, apparently.’

It gave people everything except the right to feel alone.

Then she muttered under her breath, quieter now, the sarcasm draining away as the tiredness underneath surfaced like something she had been holding underwater and had finally let float up because she thought he was not listening closely enough to hear.

"Seriously... why can’t they ever just let me rest for one night?" She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her free hand, the cigarette trailing a thin line of smoke past her temple. "Is being a celebrity some kind of fucking crime?"

’Ah.’

Now everything made sense.

The accusation, exhaustion, disgust beneath the smile, professional scanning of dark corners and resigned, well-practiced rhythm of a woman who had been beautiful and famous long enough that the two had fused into a single ongoing punishment, every rooftop a potential ambush, every stranger a probable threat, every moment of solitude borrowed rather than owned.

She was not rude.

She was tired.

And Phei, who had spent a decade being invisible and was only now learning what it felt like to be seen by everyone all the time, understood that tiredness in a way he had not expected to, of course not from the same direction or scars.

But the shape of it was familiar enough that something in his chest shifted, and the amusement that had been building since her first accusation settled into something quieter.

Something that felt, inconveniently, like the beginning of care.

Which was dangerous.

Care always started small with him. A look held too long. A voice carrying too much exhaustion. A woman standing beneath bad light with beauty in her face and wariness in her bones.

Then the strings tugged once, twice, and suddenly his priorities began moving furniture inside his soul without asking his permission.

Phei hated when his heart acted like it had administrative authority.