My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 281: Weird Word & Phei’s Bitch

The thought came out almost reverent. Almost grateful.

Almost scared.

Because this was too much. Too fast. Too good. The universe didn’t hand people like him upgrades this obscene without attaching a bill so large it would make a loan shark blush.

Basic economics: you don’t climb from rooftop suicide attempt to harem protagonist without the cosmos demanding collateral. The System had a price. Everything had a price.

He just didn’t know what it was yet.

And that unknown itched worse than any bruise.

Stop.

Just—stop.

Phei forced himself to breathe. Forced the spiral to slow, to settle, to stop trying to catastrophize what was objectively a massive fucking win wrapped in silk and desperation.

The Dean wasn’t his enemy anymore.

That was what mattered. That was the strategic victory buried underneath all the making out, the decades-old virgin revelations, and the way she’d looked at him like he was the first real thing she’d seen since the Nixon administration.

Dravenna Ashford is—

What?

Ally felt too weak. Too transactional. Like calling a nuclear warhead "handy backup."

Conquest felt too crude. Too much like something Danton would smirk about while polishing his ego.

Something more.

Yeah!

That felt about right.

She was something more. Something he hadn’t quite figured out how to categorize yet—somewhere between obsession, salvation, and the kind of dangerous curiosity that gets people eaten.

Something that would take time to understand, to develop, to claim properly.

And he was going to claim her.

Not because the System told him to. Not because she was powerful or useful or strategically valuable like a high-level chess piece.

Because he wanted to.

Because when she’d looked at him with those jade-and-emerald eyes that could probably bankrupt small countries with a single glare, when she’d called him "dragon" and meant it like a prayer and a curse in the same breath, when she’d trembled under his hands like she was coming apart at the seams and finally remembered what it felt like to want—

He’d felt something.

Something real.

Something that scared him almost as much as falling off that rooftop had, only this time the ground rushing up was soft, warm, and smelled like expensive perfume and suppressed hunger.

But that was for later.

Right now, there were more immediate things to think about.

Like the fact that he’d just publicly challenged Marcus Heavenchild to a basketball game in front of the entire school.

Oops.

In retrospect, that might have been a bit dramatic. A bit theatrical. A bit "hey, entire student body, please notice me committing social suicide in the most spectacular, slow-motion, highlight-reel way possible."

But it had worked.

Because Dravenna was going to cover for him. Was going to whisper in the right ears, plant the right seeds, and make the Heavenchilds think—really think—about what it would look like if they crushed him with administration before the challenge even happened.

If you punish him now, what does that say about Marcus?

If you silence the challenger before the challenge happens, what does that tell everyone watching?

That your son can’t fight his own battles?

That the Prince of Paradise needs his family to crush a charity case for him?

Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.

The implications would spread like slow-acting poison through the veins of Paradise’s elite. Other Legacy families would start asking questions.

Would start seeing cracks in the Heavenchild golden boy’s armour. Would start wondering if maybe—just maybe—the family at the top of the world food chain wasn’t as unassailable as the propaganda suggested.

And the Heavenchilds?

The Heavenchilds would rather bleed money than bleed face.

They’d let the challenge happen. They’d let their precious Marcus handle it himself. Because the alternative—admitting that their heir couldn’t beat a charity case without daddy’s help—was unthinkable.

Pride, Phei thought. Such a useful fucking weakness.

Let them destroy themselves with it.

Anyway.

After getting blue-balled by a milf— and honestly, that sentence still tasted weird in his mouth, like biting into something that should be sweet but was actually just strange and faintly metallic— he’d needed to burn off the accumulated energy somehow.

The Dean had wound him up like a spring—tight, trembling, ready to snap—and then sent him away with nothing but a promise, a smile, and a "this is it for today" that had felt like being edged by the universe itself until his vision went white at the edges.

My. Bitch.

Hot bitch. Terrifying bitch. Decades-old-virgin-who-could-probably-still-kill-him-with-her-bare-hands-and-make-it-look-like-an-accident bitch.

But still...

His. Bitch.

So, when he’d found Sierra and Maddie waiting at the edge of the quad—both of them looking at him like he was water in a desert, like they’d been starving for him, like they could smell how wound up he was from fifty feet away, pheromones screaming help me before I combust—

Yeah.

It had been mutual.

Coincidental, maybe. Or fate. Or just the universe’s way of saying "here, have a pressure release valve, you clearly need one before you start setting things on fire with your eyeballs."

They’d dragged him to the Hideout. Locked the door. Shed their uniforms like snake skins molting in fast-forward. And then—

Forty-five minutes.

Forty-five minutes of mouths and hands and heat. Forty-five minutes of Sierra’s cool control cracking under his tongue until she was gasping curses that would’ve made sailors blush.

Forty-five minutes of Maddie’s chaos turning desperate and needy and utterly, shamelessly his—claws in his shoulders, begging in broken syllables, body arching like she was trying to climb inside him and live there.

Forty-five minutes of three people who’d found each other at exactly the right catastrophic moment, all of them hungry, all of them willing, all of them falling apart together in the best, messiest, most honest way possible.

And now they slept.

And he watched.

And his brain kept buzzing like a hive that couldn’t figure out where to put all the honey—or whether the honey was poison and he should probably stop licking it off his fingers.

Phei sighed.

Looked over his shoulder at them.

Sierra’s face was soft in sleep. Soft in a way it never was when she was awake, when she had the Hell Bitch Queen mask locked down so tight you could bounce quarters off it. Awake, she was edges and ice and calculated cruelty.

Asleep, she looked almost... human. Vulnerable. Like someone who might actually break if you pushed too hard.

Maddie was drooling onto Sierra’s neck now. Even passed out, Maddie found ways to be absolutely chaotic—sprawled, shameless, leaving a glistening little crime scene on perfect skin like she was marking territory in her dreams.

They loved him so much.

Didn’t they?

He could see it in the way they’d reached for him even in sleep. The way they’d curled together when he left the chaise, seeking his warmth, unwilling to be cold even for a moment—like his absence left a hole that hurt more than the bruises he’d left on their hips.

Love.

Weird word.

Dangerous word.