My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 864: Dignity Over Temptation

The irony wasn’t lost on Phei...

...After his name had brewed into the ears of nearly half the world — after the basketball game that dismantled the Prince of Earth and his entourage on live television, after the footage circulated and mutated and bred a second generation of clips and edits that multiplied across the internet with the reproductive enthusiasm of something that refused to die — Phei had become popular.

Genuinely, irritatingly, inescapably popular; his face had made it worse.

Phei’s own beauty had taken the fame and sharpened it into something more personal, more invasive and hungry, because the world could forgive a man for being powerful but it could not forgive him for being powerful and looking like that while doing it.

Phei had stalkers of his own.

Mostly young women; his fans.

They appeared in clusters at malls when he went shopping or anywhere close to where he was, materialized near entrance of Sovereign Tower.

Luckily, they were harmless — enthusiastic, persistent, occasionally bold, but ultimately just girls who wanted proximity to something that brightened their day.

His appearances in public would reliably transform into a festival of hidden camera flashes, whispered coordinates shared across group chats, the occasional brave soul who approached with the trembling composure of someone who had rehearsed this moment in their bedroom mirror and was now discovering that rehearsal meant nothing when the actual man was standing in front of them, smelling the way he smelled, looking at them the way he looked at everyone — like they were the only person in the room, even when they weren’t.

Sometimes it escalated and the enthusiasm curdled into something stickier, and Phei had come to understand — reluctantly, with genuine sympathy — how miserable celebrity life actually was.

Because celebrities had to endure it and even smile through the invasion because the fans were their business.

Phei’s fans were not his business, heck he owed no shit to the public or his fans at that.

If a situation required him to walk away, he could do that without consequence.

But real celebrities didn’t have that luxury. And for the ones whose beauty made them targets — the women especially, whose bodies preceded their names into every room, whose curves and faces turned every public appearance into an invitation they hadn’t extended — the attention turned predatory; they even crossed lines and became stalking in the truest, most soul-corroding sense.

And for this woman, it clearly already had.

He understood and sympathized with it.

But understanding her situation did not make the situation itself any more tolerable.

Because Phei was looking at her now — properly looking, the way he hadn’t allowed himself to until this moment — and what he saw was making dignity considerably harder to maintain than it should have been.

She was sitting on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, the cigarette trailing lazy smoke between slim fingers, and her body was committing crimes against the rooftop lighting that should have been illegal in at least three jurisdictions.

Her long legs were bare from mid-thigh down, the skin glowing warm and smooth under the ambient light, turning the cold night air into something that felt like a lie the second it touched her.

Her dress was a testament of short, fitted and dark hugging the full, generous curve of her hips like it was afraid to let go, then cinched tight at a waist that tapered narrow enough to make his jaw clench and his cock twitch with the sudden, sharp urge to wrap both hands around it.

Above the waist, the fabric clung to the heavy, round swell of her breasts with the kind of devoted, shameless obedience that made it clear the material knew exactly what it was there for.

The neckline dipped low enough to reveal the soft, shadowed valley between them, the deep cleft where his eyes could linger and his mind could already imagine sliding his tongue. The dress didn’t just hold her tits, much more to actually worshipping them while pushing them up and together until the soft upper curves threatened to spill free with every slow breath she took.

She was built the way men ruined themselves over — all warmth and hot temptations in the places that mattered most.

Her whole body was arranged on a frame that moved with lazy, unapologetic confidence she was the kind of woman who knew exactly what her beauty and presence did to a room.

The cigarette glowed between her fingers. Smoke curled upward, but Phei’s, no matter how much his eyes wanted to stayed lower — on the way the dress stretched across her thighs, on the faint shift of her breasts when she exhaled and the quiet, sinful promise that this woman was made to be fucked thoroughly and left dripping... he couldn’t stop himself seeing beyond her beauty to the sadness she hid.

The pull in his chest tightened. Those invisible strings tugging harder now, insistent, almost angry and his blood running warm, his awareness sharpening on her in ways that had nothing to do with supernatural senses and everything to do with the simple, ancient, unapologetic fact that Phei Ryujin Tiamat was a man who wanted women and this woman, despite everything, was exactly the kind he wanted.

And that made walking away harder.

Because staying meant one of several outcomes, each one beneath him.

He could ignore her accusation and stand here — tolerating disrespect from a beautiful woman because she was beautiful, and because her thighs looked like that in this light, and because the valley between her breasts was still pulling at his peripheral vision with a gravity he had not invited and was not going to reward;

’That is cowardice and being a simp dressed in desire.’

He didn’t wear it.

He could explain himself and correct the misunderstanding.

But that meant justifying his presence to a stranger on his own rented rooftop, and justification was the language of men who needed permission to exist in spaces they already owned.

He could stay and argue while match her sarcasm while letting the friction build into whatever it was going to build into — and with a woman who looked like this, with the pull humming the way it was humming, with his blood warm and his eyes wanting to drop below her collarbones again, he knew exactly what that friction would build toward.

And it would feel good but it would cost him something he wasn’t willing to spend.

Arguing with a woman; a stranger at that. Please.

He was better than that. Even when his body was filing a formal disagreement with his brain’s decision.

So Phei did the thing that surprised her most...

...He walked away.

Slowly without announcement he set the wine glass on the bar counter with a quiet clink, turned, and walked toward the rooftop exit with the unhurried stride after he weighed his options, found all of them unworthy of him, and chosen his own dignity over every single one...

...Including the temptation.

’And gods, is she tempting.’

The pull protested his departure with the urgent insistence of something that knew what it wanted and couldn’t fathom why he was walking in the opposite direction. His heartstrings had never been wrong.

They weren’t wrong now either but Phei was no simp.

He was not going to stand on a rooftop auditioning for the role of not a threat while a beautiful woman sat ten feet away with her legs crossed and her chest catching light and her cigarette burning low, looking like the kind of mistake that ruined men who were weaker than him and made them grateful for the ruin.

The heartstrings could complain. The dragon would walk.

She watched him go.

He could feel her eyes on his back — felt the attention shift from suspicion to confusion to something else, something heavier, as the distance widened and the silence filled with the slow weight as she realized she had just made a mistake.

By the time Phei disappeared from her view — around the corner, into the warm light of the stairwell, gone — her face was burning with properly red heat climbing from her neck to her cheeks to the tips of her ears with the merciless speed of a revelation that could not be outrun.

She replayed the exchange in her mind, the accusation, stalker comment, the autograph line the sign your body remark.

Every word was landing differently now — clumsier, heavier, each one recontextualising itself in the light of a man who had listened to all of it, studied her with those amethyst eyes, and simply left.

Without arguing, trying to defend himself or giving her the satisfaction of a reaction she could read as guilt.

He had just walked away like the situation — the misunderstanding, the accusation, her — wasn’t significant enough to stay for.

"Fuck... that was mortifying."

Genuinely, structurally, soul-deep mortifying this embarrassment would never fade but fermented, growing sharper in memory with every passing hour, so that she’d still be cringing about this in the shower three days from now while hot water ran over her shoulders and her brain replayed his face — that absurdly, unfairly, devastatingly handsome face — turning away from her without a word.

And in the wreckage of her composure, one thought surfaced — small, desperate, clinging to whatever dignity she had left:

’He wouldn’t post about this on social media and tell the whole world. He wouldn’t, right?

...Right?