My Taboo Harem!

The laughter surrounding the long breakfast table continued behind Phei as he crossed the Empyrean Dining Hall.

Phei left all of that behind him.

The private Castellano table waited near the southern windows, removed from the loudest part of the hall but close enough that its occupants had witnessed every brutal second. Morning sunlight spilled across its white linen, silver service, and untouched dishes, lending the scene an almost peaceful elegance that belonged to a different breakfast entirely.

Three people sat there.

Adriana occupied the seat nearest the windows, wearing an expression of elegant composure that would have fooled anyone who had never watched her eyes follow Phei across a room. Her dark hair fell over one shoulder in smooth waves, framing the mature beauty of her face and the faint curve at the corner of her lips.

Brett sat opposite her; he had not looked toward Phei once.

At the head of the table sat Vittorio Castellano, Patriarch of the Castellano family.

He was a broad, imposing man in his late fifties, dressed in a charcoal suit cut with the severe elegance of old European money. Silver had begun claiming the dark hair at his temples, though age had done nothing to soften the hard intelligence of his features. His hands rested calmly beside his plate, one bearing the heavy black-gold signet ring of the Castellano line.

Vittorio watched Phei approach without smiling.

He did not stand or seem to be a man who’d reach for a weapon either just because of Phei approaching<anno data-annotation-id="a65665eb-e631-f5d1-416b-1d1947fb5a38" data-title=".">.¹</anno>

For the moment, that counted as diplomacy.

Phei stopped beside the table and inclined his head with genuine respect.

"Good morning, Patriarch Vittorio Castellano. Madam Adriana Castellano."

Vittorio studied him for several seconds before gesturing toward the empty chair beside Adriana:

"Sit, Phei."

No boy or insult disguised as formality.

Only his name which Phei accepted the offered seat and lowered himself into it, aware of Adriana’s gaze touching the side of his face before retreating toward her plate.

She looked wonderfully innocent while Brett remained completely motionless.

His fork sat untouched beside a plate of food that had long since gone cold. His head stayed lowered, shoulders held too tightly beneath his expensive jacket, eyes fixed upon a point somewhere near the edge of the table.

He had not spoken since Phei arrived.

That silence was not discipline but survival.

Phei settled one hand upon the table and allowed the power already moving through him to deepen.

The Dragon Dominance had never been withdrawn; the shift remained invisible to everyone without extraordinary senses, yet Brett reacted immediately. His fingers tightened beneath the table and his breathing shortened as a faint tremor moved through his right shoulder before he forced it still.

Dragon Dominance did more than intimidate; the system had explained further that repeated exposure to it altered the emotional foundation of those caught beneath it: Whatever negative emotion that dominated his enemies response would deepen with each encounter:

Fear, jealousy, inferiority, resentment, obsession, helplessness...

...given enough exposure, the emotion stopped being temporary and began sinking into the soul.

First came repetition, then recognition and eventually, the emotion condensed into a PrimalSeed.

When Phei later used the Cosmic Dragon Face upon the victim, that seed would become an opening that the target’s soul would already recognize the Dragon as the source of its deepest fear, humiliation, or inferiority:

Enslaving the Legacy heir would no longer require breaking an untouched will.

Dragon Dominance would have spent weeks or months cracking the foundation beforehand...

...the Cosmic Dragon Face would only need to enter through the damage.

And Phei knew exactly what he wanted from Brett.

Fear.

’Deep, animal fear.’

...and the instinctive certainty that resisting Phei would only make the inevitable more painful.

What did Phei want from the Legacy boys?

To break them emotionally before he ever placed chains around their souls.

One by one, he would turn their pride into weakness, their hatred into dependence, and their fear into the first stones of their future obedience.

Brett had already given him an excellent beginning.

The pressure surrounding Phei intensified.

He was using the fully active Dragon Dominance, which was 50x stronger than its passive state. He did not release it carelessly across the entire hall; the power was focused through intention, converging upon Brett with the quiet precision of a blade resting against the throat.

Brett’s face lost another shade of colour.

His eyes remained lowered.

He knew that looking at Phei would be worse.

Some terrified part of him believed eye contact might invite the Dragon back into his soul and into the moment when every secret he had buried suddenly stood naked beneath amethyst eyes.

Phei did not force him to look up.

’Fear grows beautifully in darkness.’

The longer Brett imagined what waited across the table, the more generously his own mind fed the seed.

Yet Brett was not the only person affected.

Dragon Dominance was not a simple beam of power. Even when directed, its presence spread through the nearby space, touching everyone according to what already existed inside them.

Adriana’s fingers tightened around the stem of her water glass.

The aura reached her and found something entirely different from Brett’s terror. It brushed against the attachment she had been trying to keep elegant, controlled, and hidden from the husband sitting at the same table. Rather than creating fear, it deepened the quiet pull of her lust and the taboo that was between him and her that she had been managing since the party.

The shift in her was subtle, her breathing slowed, her eyes became warmer whenever they passed over him and a faint colour touched her cheeks before she concealed it behind a sip of water.

Phei felt it and chose not to inspect it too closely; this conversation was supposed to prevent a family war, not start a different one at the same table.

Vittorio’s reaction surprised him most.

The Castellano Patriarch sat directly within the edge of Phei’s active dominance, yet no hostility rose from him; no jealousy, fear or wounded pride demanding that he challenge the boy who had taken his daughter out from beneath his roof.

Instead, Phei sensed respect but it was not to be mistaken as submission.

Vittorio Castellano was not about to bow, lower his gaze, or start addressing a teenager as his sovereign. His pride remained intact, old and heavy and earned through decades of carrying one of the Legacy Families.

But beneath that pride, the Dragon Dominance discovered an acknowledgment Vittorio had apparently already reached on his own.

He respected the man Phei was becoming not the family he was coming from but Phei himself.

The discovery almost unsettled him.

He had crossed the hall expecting sharp words, veiled threats, perhaps an ultimatum concerning Amber. He had already prepared several polite ways to explain that Amber would not be dragged back into the Castellano estate against her will, along with several less polite alternatives should Vittorio prove difficult.

Instead, he found respect.

Phei glanced toward Adriana.

<annotations style="display: none;">A/N: Meaning he did not see Phei as enemy like Harold did.</annotations>

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