My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 866: Stockholm Syndrome

Vic looked at Phei with calculating eyes, warm, strategic, wanting; she and handed him a vintage worth more than most people’s cars as a down payment on what she intended to collect later.

And Phei genuinely didn’t know how to react to her, because Victoria occupied a category in his mind that defied every clean label he tried to attach to it.

Wasn’t he just walking away from the celebrity woman to avoid being a simp?

Yet here he was, thinking about conquering Victoria — the same girl who had tormented him for years and made his life deliberately, creatively, enthusiastically miserable across a span of time that should have produced hatred and had instead produced... this;

This warm, complicated, deeply inconvenient desire to have her. To take her. To make the girl who had spent years tormenting me, moan my name into a pillow until her throat gives out.

Yeah. He definitely had... what was that syndrome?

He could not remember its nam but a chill ran down his spine...

...Because the thought landed with a familiar echo — a déjà vu so precise it made him stop mid-step.

Wasn’t this the exact same thing he’d thought when he decided to fuck Sierra when she first came to Sovereign Tower?

She had stood in his space with all that cold Montgomery composure and he’d looked at her and thought yes, the woman who used to despise me and did all that to me, that’s the one I want beneath me.

And then again at the fire pit lounge at the academy, where he’d pressed Delilah against himself and kissed her until neither of them could breathe; the same girl whose circle had made him a target and the whole things she did to him with Victoria or Danton sometimes.

The pattern was undeniable; the women who hurt him became the women he hungered for. The tormenter became the target. The pain became foreplay.

"Yeah. Definitely... syndrome... Ah, what’s the name of it?"

"Stockholm syndrome," Eira’s voice arrived in his skull bright, amused, insufferably awake.

Phei groaned. "How long have you been listening?"

"Long enough." He could hear the grin in her voice. The ancient, mischievous, freshly-rested grin of a fairy who had been unconscious for hours and had apparently chosen this exact moment to rejoin the living.

"But the truth is undeniable... let’s see...take me for example; The same fairy who more or less tortured you during training, and you rewarded me with orgasms good enough to put me in a coma for half a day. It’s either Stockholm syndrome or you’re a masochist, Master."

"That’s disgusting, Eira!" Phei said flatly. "There’s a difference between rewarding loyalty and — you know what, never mind. You wouldn’t understand nuance if it bit you."

She giggled bright, unbothered, chaos-incarnate giggle that had been absent from his skull almost all day and whose return he was, against his better judgment, genuinely glad to hear.

"Stockholm syndrome it is, then!" Eira declared with a look of profound understanding on a face only he could see. "Confirmed. Diagnosed. Terminal."

Before he could reply —

He saw... Catrina.

She was coming from the other end of the hallway, the boutique’s warm golden light catching her hair, Phei’s jacket still draped over her shoulders like a trophy she had been awarded and intended to be buried in.

The moment she spotted him, her steps slowed and her whole body shivered but not from cold, or the hallway’s temperature, but from something deeper that started in her chest and radiated outward through her limbs until her fingers trembled and her thighs pressed together and her breath caught audibly in the quiet corridor.

"Is that what I think it is?" Eira asked, her voice dropping to something between fascination and delight.

Phei didn’t answer her and just walked faster.

Reaching Catrina, he stopped close; closer than necessary enough that the warmth between their bodies bridged the gap before their skin did.

"B-Boss..." Her voice came out sheepish, small, a whisper wearing shoes too big for it. "I’ve been looking for you."

He smiled and stepped closer.

Catrina gulped down, her whole body went taut but not with fear, with excitement, the kind she was trying desperately to hide and failing at so spectacularly that the effort itself became part of the display.

Her shoulders tensed as her lips parted; her eyes widened by a fraction and then fought to narrow again, the muscles in her face waging a visible war between composure and the complete annihilation of composure.

The hallway grew more quiet.

Just them. Just breathing. His and hers, mingling in the warm air between their faces, the sound of two people standing too close in an empty corridor where the golden light made everything look softer and warmer and more dangerous than it had any right to.

Catrina’s hands that hung at her sides, rolled into tight, trembling fists her nails pressing into her palms, her knuckles white, every finger clenched in a desperate bid to stop her nerves from doing what her nerves very badly wanted to do, which was reach for him.

Her head tilted up to meet his eyes, her chin lifting while her throat got exposed, and the vulnerability of the gesture; the bare neck, parted lips, wide dark eyes looking up at him from six inches below — was so raw it made the air between them feel thick enough to chew.

’So close,’ she thought.

They’d been of course, closer than this before; hours ago he’d wrapped his arm around her tonight, pulled her against his chest, let her lean into him on a golden staircase while Lydia competed for the other side.

But it hadn’t been like heated and charged with his eyes on her like this, his attention focused entirely on her, his presence pressing against her skin without touching it.

And the wetness she had been getting drenched around him all day, x10 worse than she usually did, soaking through her underwear every time his warmth reached her or his voice dropped low or his hand landed anywhere on her body, and she knew Lydia was suffering the same way, and probably every other girl within a five-metre radius of him, but this — standing here, alone with him, his face this close, his breath warm on her forehead — this was worse.

’This is catastrophic... Boss.’

Catrina was literally leaking her thighs were slick and her body making decisions her mind hadn’t authorised and couldn’t override.

Seeing her shake, Phei took a step back.

Catrina’s eyes flashed with disappointment immediate and involuntary, in a flicker of loss that crossed her face before she could catch it.

But before the disappointment could settle, Phei’s hands found her shoulders.

"Mhmm~"

A sound left her mouth, quite not a moan, a long sigh of ecstasy and something in between — soft, trembling, helpless — the sound a woman made when she was drowning in her own want and the man she wanted had just put his hands on her body and every nerve ending she possessed had fired simultaneously.

Phei held her comfortably and firmly; not to throw her deeper into the pit of her own lust — he’d achieved that before he’d even touched her — but to calm her, ground her and give her something steady to hold onto while her body vibrated at frequencies her mind couldn’t control.

His thumbs pressed gently against her collarbones through the jacket — his jacket, still warm from him, still carrying his scent — and he watched her breathing slow, and her shaking subsided.

All the wild desperate heat in her eyes settle into something warmer and softer and infinitely more grateful.

She relaxed and her fists uncurled.

Catrina’s shoulders dropped beneath his palms and only then he stepped close again — closer than before and leaned down, his mouth near her ear, his voice low and warm and soothing as it threaded its way into her:

"So... what is it that you desire... to talk about with me?"

Her mind stopped on desire.

Everything after that word became static white noise:

The hallway, the golden light, the boutique, the entire island — all of it dissolved into background, irrelevant, meaningless, because the only thing that existed in Catrina’s universe right now was the warmth of his breath against her ear and the word desire sitting inside her skull like a lit match in a room full of gasoline.

"B-Boss..."

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A/N:I am actually very sure you didn’t see this coming...