My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 442: Light in the Darkness
Chapter 442: Light in the Darkness
The Romano Café stood in Downtown like a black-glass cathedral built by people who had been wealthy since before borders had names.
Seventeen stories of obsidian and brushed gold rose from the most expensive square block in Downtown Paradise with the kind of arrogance that didn’t need signage.
But it had one anyway.
The word café was doing heroic, dishonest work here. This wasn’t a café the way a private jet wasn’t transportation. The Romanos had poured three generations of money—money still faintly warm from activities polite society preferred to forget—into this place.
They had turned mafia into legitimacy the slow, patient way: restaurants, hotels, quiet acquisitions, occasional quiet wars with the Price family over who owned the skyline.
A massive block of raw ice—glacial blue-white—sat on a polished steel pedestal at the base of the entrance steps. Ringed with frost-kissed plants and underlit by blue LEDs that made the whole sculpture pulse like something dredged from the bottom of an arctic trench.
And from the exact center of that impossible cold: fire. Real, living flames. Tall, hungry tongues of orange and gold licking upward from inside the frozen heart, heat and ice locked in the same space without apology, without physics daring to intervene.
Ice and fire. Coexisting. Defying every natural law just because the Romano family could afford to pay the laws to look the other way.
Blue light caught the flames and shattered them across the wet pavement in trembling gold reflections.
None of that mattered tonight.
Phei stood beside it.
The outdoor terrace wasn’t crowded. You didn’t crowd a place where a single appetiser cost more than most people’s rent. The clientele paid precisely for privacy—for the luxury of pretending no one else existed. Quiet murmurs. Clinking crystal. Everyone minding their own empire.
Until Phei stood there.
One hand in his pocket, the other thumb-scrolling something mundane on his phone. The blue glow from the ice sculpture painted one side of him cold and ethereal; the warm gold spilling from the café windows bathed the other side in something almost holy. Women’s fingers tightened on wine stems without conscious thought.
He wasn’t performing… just existence. And existence, in his case, was a weapon.
The women on the terrace were looking—with the slow, predatory hunger of people rich enough to want anything and refined enough to recognise when something exceptional had wandered into their hunting ground.
Their companions—suddenly, inexplicably—became background noise.
Phei didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Same difference.
Then the car arrived.
He recognised the silhouette before the tyres even kissed the kerb. Park Seraph.
Jade’s family flagship. Low, wide, vicious—sharp angles and flared haunches like a panther mid-leap.
The P-with-wings grille emblem caught the café’s gold light and threw it back like a challenge.
