My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 850: Um, Boss... What’s a Slave?

"Um, Boss?"

"Mmm?"

A Rolls-Royce drifted through the glowing arteries of Paradise with silken, traitorous grace, quiet enough that the city lights sliding across the tinted windows felt like fragments of a dying dream. Two million dollars of hand-stitched leather, bulletproof glass, and an engine that purred at frequencies engineered to make passengers forget they were in a vehicle at all — absurdly, expensively, with the meticulous devotion only a grandmother with trillions and a pathological need to spoil could orchestrate — disguised as a borrowed hotel car.

Phei didn’t own it in fact Phei didn’t own any car:

The Cosmic Dragon who could collapse people with his aura was being chauffeured around Hell’s Paradise Island in someone else’s obscenely customized vehicle because his personal fleet consisted of exactly zero automobiles and the Empress had apparently decided this particular injustice would be corrected without his knowledge, one disguised Rolls-Royce at a time.

Phei lounged lazily in the backseat beside Emily, one arm resting against the door, the leather warm against his skin in a way that felt deliberately intimate — engineered, calibrated to his body temperature, because of course it was.

Nothing about this car was accidental; everything had been built around a grandson who didn’t know he was being cradled by upholstery that cost more than most people’s homes.

Lydia drove with the effortless effort that made traffic laws feel like polite suggestions she had considered and elegantly declined while Catrina sat shotgun, scrolling through her phone.

Emily had been quiet suspiciously quiet the entire ride, now that Phei thought about it, now had taken a liberty to say something, ask something actually.

"What does it mean you enslaved Cassiopeia?"

The silence that followed was catastrophic:

Phei froze completely first his arm on the door went rigid while his face, which had been arranged in the easy half-smile enjoying a comfortable drive, locked into the specific expression like he had just heard a landmine click under his foot and was now deciding whether to move or start praying to whatever gods hadn’t already abandoned him to this circus.

Up front, Catrina also slowly lowered her phone.

Lydia’s hands remained on the wheel, but her eyes rose immediately toward the rearview mirror like a woman watching a train wreck in real time.

Emily blinked once at the reaction.

"...What?"

The young dragon stared at her but not because of the question itself — though the question itself was, on any honest assessment, a detonation wrapped in polite inquiry — but because of the absurdly calm way she had asked it.

The same tone she used to request clarification on an email attachment with the same flat, professional, mildly curious inflection she would’ve brought to quarterly reports and logistical briefings and every other piece of information she processed with her clinical efficiency whose brain had been optimized for data and had never, in its entire operational history, been introduced to the concept of dramatic timing.

"You’ve been quiet this whole drive because of that?" Phei finally asked.

Emily nodded. "Yes."

"...You sat there plotting this?"

"I wanted to ask properly."

Catrina folded over laughing so suddenly the seatbelt caught her like a disapproving chaperone at an orgy.

Lydia bit her lip hard enough that her shoulders started shaking, her hands white-knuckling the wheel of a car worth more than most rich kids trust funds.

And Phei — sitting in the dim leather-scented dark of the backseat, still frozen and processing — found himself thinking, with involuntary vividness, about what Eira would have done if she’d been here. If the chaos incarnate of the Void-Ice had been sitting in this car instead of lying face-down in his penthouse, drooling into a pillow she had been unconscious on for hours because she had asked for something she couldn’t handle and was now paying the biological invoice in full.

She would have died. No exaggeration; she would have been on the floor of this two-million-dollar Rolls — the floor that probably cost more per square inch than most apartments — pointing at all of them with one ancient finger while wheezing like a malfunctioning demon, tears streaming down her face, her wings tangled in the seatbelt, her voice cracking between gasps:

"She really knows exactly when to drop truth bombs. LOOK at them. Look at their FACES. The dragon is SWEATING. Emily — Emily, you beautiful, socially illiterate disaster of a woman — I ADORE you. Someone get this girl a medal and a therapist."

Phei rubbed his face. He missed her but he also thanked every god in every pantheon that she was not here right now, because the resulting chaos would have ended with the Rolls in a ditch and all of them arrested for public indecency and emotional terrorism.

"Um, Emily, it’s—"

"What’s that even like?" Emily interrupted with genuine curiosity. "Or wait — is it metaphorical? It has to be metaphorical, right?"

She laughed lightly.

"Because actual slavery would be insane. Like... slave slave? In this day and age? With chains and everything?"

Lydia lost it first as a bark of laughter escaped her so violently the Rolls swerved, although just slightly, a two-million-dollar hiccup in the middle of Hell’s Paradise’s glowing boulevard, before correcting itself with the smooth mechanical dignity of a vehicle that refused, on principle, to be embarrassed by its driver.

Catrina slapped the dashboard hard enough to leave a mark.

Phei physically leaned forward, covering his mouth with both hands as if that could possibly contain the sheer absurdity of the situation. freeweɓnovel.cøm

Emily frowned. "What?"

"She really lacks imagination outside her field, huh?" Lydia muttered, wiping one eye while still fighting the wheel like it had personally offended her, looking at her boss.

"It seems that way," Phei said carefully, immediately sensing that the heavens had personally handed him an escape route and he would be an idiot of historic proportions not to take it.

’Bomb dodged. Hopefully.’

Emily looked between them suspiciously. "What does that mean?"

Lydia glanced at her through the rearview mirror. "Emily... do you genuinely consume nothing outside, uh, being... Emily?"