My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 422: The Resident of 98 Unit C!!

Chapter 422: The Resident of 98 Unit C!!

Victoria sat at the long glass dining table. She looked around slowly, taking inventory— cataloguing every detail like a detective who’d already solved the crime but still needed to see the body.

Phei’s chair was empty.

Again.

No surprise.

Whenever the family gathered like this — plates steaming, sunlight pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows, everyone pretending the past week hadn’t torn their entire world apart and fucked it sideways — Phei was never there.

He always had somewhere to be. A “missed routine” in the gym. A sudden call. A meeting that couldn’t wait.

Even a fool could see he was avoiding these moments.

Deliberately.

Right now, he was in the gym — as if that body, sculpted, lethal, godly, radiating power that made the air feel colder, needed daily maintenance or it would somehow decline into mediocrity like the rest of them.

Victoria’s lips pressed into a thin line.

Across from her, Sienna ate in perfect silence, phone balanced on one palm, thumb scrolling with mechanical precision.

She hadn’t looked up once since she sat down. The rest of the world might as well not exist.

Sienna had always been good at being absent while physically present — a talent that would’ve been impressive if it wasn’t so fucking annoying.

Melissa sat at the head of the table, posture straight, hands folded around a coffee mug she hadn’t sipped from in ten minutes. Delilah sat beside her, picking at the edge of her toast, eyes down, wearing one of Phei’s shirts that hung off her shoulder like a flag of surrender.

The tension between mother and daughters was no longer explosive — it had settled into something quieter, heavier, the hush after a detonation when the dust is still settling and nobody knows which walls are load-bearing and which ones are about to come down.

No one had spoken about the last few days.

Not really.

They’d danced around it for days — but Melissa had decided today was different.

Today the girls would hear the full truth about their birth, about the murdered twin, about the boy they had grown up calling brother.

Victoria felt it coming like a storm on radar — the specific quality of her mother’s silence that meant the next words were going to cost something.

She set her fork down.

“Mom,” she started quietly.

Melissa looked up, eyes soft but resolute. The eyes of a woman who’d spent the last few days building the courage to burn down the last wall between her and her children and had woken up this morning with the match already lit.

“I know,” she said before Victoria could finish. “We’re talking today. All of it. No more pretending.”

Delilah exhaled sharply through her nose. Sienna’s thumb paused on the screen for the first time — the only tell she’d give, but for Sienna it was the equivalent of someone else slamming their fist on the table.

Victoria opened her mouth again — then closed it.

She didn’t know what to ask first.

She didn’t know if she wanted the answers.

She only knew the silence was about to break, and when it did, nothing in this family would ever fit the same way again.

****

Below the in the gym, Phei racked the bar with a muted clang that still echoed through the vaulted gym ceiling like distant thunder fucking off for the day.

75 kilos per side.

Again.

He sat up on the bench, forearms resting on his thighs, black tank clinging to sweat-slicked skin like it was personally offended at being separated from him. His breathing was even — too even for a human lifting that weight at his age and build.

Around him the 95th-floor gym had gone unnaturally quiet.

Every machine, every treadmill, every squat rack was occupied.

The Sovereign Tower’s private gym had once been a sanctuary for maybe five residents at any given time — a place where billionaires worked out in cathedral silence, pretending they didn’t notice each other while secretly comparing net worths and calf definition.

Now every dedicated member from the upper residential floors was here. Ninety-five to one hundred, 100 percent capacity. They weren’t even pretending to work out anymore.

Half of them were staring openly.

His residence in the Sovereign Tower was no longer a secret.

The internet had done its work. Clips of him walking through the lobby, stepping into the private elevator, disappearing behind frosted glass doors had spread like wildfire.

The world now knew exactly where the godly beautiful boy who air-walked on basketball courts lived.

Thankfully the residents of the Sovereign Tower were people who were accustomed to wealth and power and celebrity and usually couldn’t be bothered to look up from their portfolios.

But women were behaving like teenagers at a concert.

Phei sighed, dragging the small black towel across his face. When he lowered it, his amethyst eyes scanned the room once — calm, unreadable.

Another phone flashed from the far corner.

He didn’t react.

Valentina appeared at his side like she’d been waiting for the exact moment he finished the set.

She wore matching black leggings and a cropped compression top that showed every carved line of her abdomen — a body built by fifteen years of professional training and the specific vanity of a woman who knew she was being watched and enjoyed the attention.

Her dark hair was pulled into a high ponytail, swaying as she sauntered over with his larger towel draped over one arm.

She chuckled low, pressing the fresh towel to his shoulder.

“They’re eating you alive today,” she murmured, amusement curling her lips.

Phei tilted his head toward her, letting her dab the sweat from his neck.

“As long as they stay over there,” he said quietly, “I don’t care.”

The coldness he’d had had vanished and Phei was back to his old self — just so much more self-aware of himself and what he represented.

He’d gotten even more dangerous at flirting. Yesterday a man had nearly fought him for flirting with his woman.

Phei had shrugged and given a speech about how the man shouldn’t be so controlling, that a woman had the right to admire things.

The gym had laughed while the cool aura did its thing — turning the guy’s rage into a public embarrassment so complete he’d left without his dignity while making Phei even cooler and hotter to others.

Valentina’s eyes flicked toward the treadmills. The amusement shifted into something sharper. More deliberate.

“She’s still running.”

Phei followed her gaze.

There — on the far end of the long row of treadmills — she ran.

Long black compression leggings hugged every curve and hollow of her legs, the material so thin it looked painted on. No visible lines beneath. Nothing.

Just smooth, powerful muscle flexing with each stride — quads firing, hamstrings lengthening, calves contracting, glutes clenching in a rhythm that belonged on a track or a stage, not a residential gym.

Every step sent a subtle ripple through her ass as she had no pants inside — proud, unapologetic, hypnotic — the kind of movement that made men forget their own names and women question their sexuality.

A black sports bra left her toned midriff bare — abs

carved like they’d been sculpted from warm marble, a faint sheen of sweat catching the overhead lights and turning her skin into something that belonged in a gallery or a bedroom.

Her long dark hair was pulled into a high, swinging ponytail that bounced with metronomic rhythm.

She hadn’t once looked his way.

Not when he’d walked in. Not when the entire gym had gone quiet. Not when phones started flashing and whispers had spread like brushfire through the machines.

She ran like the rest of the room didn’t exist. Like he didn’t exist.

And in a building where every woman with a pulse had started finding excuses to be in whatever room Phei was in, her disinterest was so thorough it bordered on performance art.

Except it wasn’t performance.

That was the thing.

She genuinely did not care.

Phei watched her for a long moment, eyes narrowing slightly.

He’d got to meet one of the people he shared his floor with (yes, this very woman) — the floor had three units: his A, the occupied B, and the last C. So, he’d met the new resident of C and had been mesmerized by her aura, her presence alone.

Phei had been surprised how unfazed she’d been by his presence.

Yesterday she had trained beside him — thanks to Valentina playing her cards like the masterful operator she was, orchestrating a “coincidental” rack share with the subtlety of a chess grandmaster moving a pawn.

They’d shared a squat rack for twenty minutes. She had matched his weight. Matched his reps. Matched his rest periods.

Never spoke. Never smiled.

Never acknowledged the auras rolling off him or the way every other woman in the gym had started breathing harder the moment he entered.

She’d existed next to him like he was furniture.

Expensive furniture, sure. But furniture.

Only once — when he’d brushed past her to rerack a plate — had his hand grazed her lower back.

Just the lightest contact.

The Goddess Fall Touch.

Her stride had faltered for half a second.

A single, involuntary moan had slipped from her throat — soft, shocked, raw — the sound of a body betraying its owner in the middle of a public gym.

She’d immediately clenched her jaw, straightened, and kept moving. Hadn’t looked at him. Hadn’t acknowledged it.

Had simply folded the moment away into whatever compartment she kept the things that weren’t supposed to happen and continued her set as if the last three seconds had been deleted from the timeline.

But Phei had heard it.

And felt it.

That sound had lodged somewhere deep in his chest and refused to leave. It played on loop when he closed his eyes.

A soft, shocked, raw exhalation from a woman who didn’t make sounds like that for anyone.

He’d already decided she would be his.