My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 847: Innocent Monster in the Glass

Like every Legacy family that had begun drifting toward Phei’s descent from Paradise to Hell’s Paradise Island, drawn with the quiet certainty of ruin finding the aftermath of war, Lucienne had begun realizing she was no different from them after all.

The realization came slowly and shamefully.

Because the way she found herself leaning toward Phei was something language itself seemed unequipped to hold.

It was too ugly to be called fascination and far too consuming to be reduced to obsession:

Those words felt insultingly small beside whatever this thing inside her had become or had always been — this dense, warm, suffocating gravity that pulled at her thoughts when she wasn’t guarding them and pulled harder when she was, flooding her veins with liquid heat and leaving her cunt aching and dripping in the quiet hours of the night.

It was the kind of pull that made disasters inevitable...

...And turned caution into smoke and left a woman dripping and desperate for a man she had no right to crave.

’If the Little Prodigy knew, he would laugh — that low, dark, knowing laugh that promises ruin wrapped in velvet.’

He would’ve laughed at the woman who carried herself as though she stood above the women orbiting him like broken prayers around a false god.

The same woman who had looked at them with thinly veiled disdain — had studied their faces, their devotion, the specific way they rearranged their entire lives around his gravitational center — and had thought, with the cold composure of a woman who had never in her life lost control of anything: I could never become one of them.

She was becoming one of them.

She could feel it happening the way a woman feels a fever settling into her bones and between her thighs — not all at once, not dramatically, but in slow creeping increments that she kept dismissing as something else until the heat was everywhere and the dismissals had run out.

And the worst part — the part that made her grip the windowsill until her knuckles whitened and a fresh pulse of slick heat spilled between her legs — was that she understood why they orbited him. She understood it now. She had watched them from a distance with disdain and she had been wrong, completely and humiliatingly wrong, because what drew those women to Phei Ryujin Tiamat was not what she had assumed.

Not beauty.

Not charm.

’Temptation.’

The sort that did not arrive loudly, did not announce itself with fanfare or seduction, but lingered quietly at the edges of a person’s awareness — patient, warm, almost gentle — until they woke one morning and realized their restraint had already rotted away beneath them like wet wood under a house they’d believed was sound.

Phei was not the fall itself. He was merely the voice near the edge, soft and unhurried, convincing people the drop would feel like flying.

And by the time you understood what the voice had done, you were already mid-air, legs spread and cunt clenching around nothing but the memory of amethyst eyes.

And Lucienne — gods. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Lucienne had once acted as though nothing about him could ever disturb her peace and worn her composure like armor.

She had stood in his presence and felt his attention land on her — that full, undivided, amethyst-eyed attention that made other women forget their own names — and had not flinched, or blushed.

She met his gaze and held it and thought, with genuine conviction: I am not susceptible to this.

Well, she always was obsessed with Phei but she would never let him know.

Then Phei had shamelessly asked her out.

Not casually, either the practiced ease like a man who asked women out the way other men ordered coffee — frequently, without thought, expecting the answer before the question landed.

No; the dragon had looked her in the eyes, directly, without blinking, and praised her without restraint, without embarrassment, without a single trace of self-consciousness, as though reverence came to him as naturally as breathing.

He had told her no ordinary man deserved her. That only a god could stand beside her without looking lesser.

He had said it the way other men said good morning — plainly, factually, as though he were stating the weather facts rather than dismantling the foundations of her entire self-regard and painting vivid images in her mind of that Phei already was god pinning her down and claiming every forbidden inch of her body.

The arrogance of it should have disgusted her.

She had rehearsed disgust in her obsession of him, and she had prepared it in advance, a clean crisp rejection folded and waiting in the back of her mind for exactly this kind of man — the kind who believed his own beauty entitled him to hers.

She had been ready.

Instead, she remembered every word with terrifying clarity. Every syllable. The exact cadence of his voice. The way his mouth moved around god and deserve and lesser and the way his amethyst was saying was anything less than objective truth.

She remembered the way her pulse had kicked. Once. Hard. Straight between her legs, flooding her with shameful wetness as she pictured him proving every word by fucking her senseless against the nearest wall.

This is exactly what she’d wanted, building towards for years until she came back into his orbit and he was this good, not the little prodigy she’d left behind.

Eventually she had agreed to the date.

Though entirely on her own terms — terms she had set with meticulous care, conditions designed to preserve the architecture of her dignity while still, technically, saying yes; he could wait and be patient until she came to him when she was ready, and not a moment before, and he would accept that timeline because she was Lucienne and she did not bend her schedule for anyone, least of all a man who looked at her like she was already his.

All he had to do was wait.

And since they lived on the same floor of Sovereign Tower — a coincidence he had since begun to suspect was not a coincidence at all, because nothing in Phei Ryujin Tiamat’s proximity ever turned out to be accidental — there had been no need for numbers.

She could either find him at the gym, in the halls, at any hour or he could appear at his door whenever she pleased.

He had secretly hoped for the last option.

Ah, the development would have been staggering.

Yet despite never showing it openly — despite the cool unbothered mask he wore when her name surfaced in his mind, despite the easy shrug that said she’ll come around or she won’t, and either way I’ll survive—

—Phei had waited long enough for even his patience to thin. Days passed. Then more.

The mysterious neighbor named Lucienne neither approached him nor allowed herself to be seen again after that encounter.

She had vanished from his hallway, from his gym, from every common space they shared. Not hiding, exactly — hiding implied fear, and Lucienne did not do fear — but withdrawing...

...Pulling back into herself with the deliberate precision like she had felt something crack in her composure and needed time, alone, to assess the damage before anyone else noticed it.

She played the game beautifully.

So beautifully, in fact, that Phei had eventually concluded she simply was not interested in him at all — reluctantly, with a faint private ache he would never have admitted to — in the narrow drawer he kept for women who had looked at him, weighed him, and walked away unimpressed.

It happened. Rarely. But it happened.

Wasn’t she interested in him?

The answer was almost laughable.

Because at that very moment — at this very breath — Lucienne stood within the presidential suite of the Infinity Chaos Hotel, countless floors beneath Phei’s penthouse, both palms pressed flat against the floor-to-ceiling glass, her forehead nearly touching the window, watching him from far below as he stepped into the waiting Rolls-Royce.

She was watching him the way starving people watched feasts through glass —

Lucienne’s breath had fogged a small circle on the window, she could see him perfectly well through the glass; dark hair, the easy stride, the three girls flanking him with their warm proprietary orbit, the way the sunlight caught his profile for a single instant before the car door closed and took him away.

Her fingers pressed harder against the glass. Her jaw was tight while her eyes — dark, intelligent, the eyes of a woman who had built her entire identity around the principle that she could not be moved — followed the Rolls-Royce as it pulled away from the entrance, gliding down the long curved driveway in matte-dark silence, shrinking.

She watched until it was a speck. Then she watched the space where the speck had been.

And stood there:

Palms on the glass. Breath fogging the window. The presidential suite silent behind her, vast and expensive and empty, and Lucienne alone in it with the full, nauseating, exhilarating, terrifying weight of understanding that the woman who could never become one of them had, at some point she could not identify and could no longer reverse, become exactly that.

She was orbiting.

She was already mid-air.

And the drop, gods help her, was starting to feel like flying.