My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 497: Room V.123: Phei’s Mother?

Chapter 497: Room V.123: Phei’s Mother?

The elevator doors slid open onto a floor where money’s sterile elegance fought to mask the inevitable tide of decay, corridors stretching wider under a warm golden glow that replaced the harsh corpse-white glare below, polished wood gleaming beneath their feet at a cost rivaling most people’s monthly rent while real paintings adorned the walls.

Fresh flowers lined every sill in a desperate aesthetic bribe against death’s slow encroachment, heavy doors with gleaming brass numbers exhaling faint lavender and crisp linen that waged a losing war against the underlying rot.

Nurses glided past in soft-soled shoes, one young dark-haired woman with hips swaying just enough to draw the eye glancing up to catch sight of Phei, her face blooming into something far warmer than practiced professionalism—a genuine smile whispering she’d surrender to him over the nearest supply cart if only he murmured the right invitation.

“Good afternoon, Phei.”

“Afternoon, Grace. How’s the knee?”

“Better. The physio you recommended was brilliant. Thank you.”

He gave her a lazy two-fingered wave and kept walking, already bored with the gratitude.

A doctor rounded the corner next—older, grey beard, reading glasses shoved up into his thinning hair like antennae.

The man’s face split into a genuine grin when he spotted Phei.

“Mr. Ryujin Tiamat. Good to see you back.”

“Dr. Osei. Wife finally made you change the glasses, huh?”

“She said the old ones made me look like a mole.”

“She wasn’t wrong.”

The doctor barked a genuine laugh and clapped Phei firmly on the shoulder as he passed, still chuckling with the warmth of a shared, shadowy inside joke while Maya walked silently beside him, her brows subtly drawn together as she absorbed the scene without a single question.

He knew them all—every nurse gliding past with familiar nods, every orderly exchanging quick words, even the weary woman restocking the supply closet who called out “Hi, Phei!” and received his casual finger-flick in return after months of small talk and inside jokes.

Months of remembering which knee ached worst and whose wife despised their glasses, all while pretending this polished floor wasn’t merely a more elegant antechamber to the grave.

Maya’s frown deepened with a faint crease between her brows, though she held her silence like the smart girl she was.

At Room V.123, Phei paused before the door, his hand hovering on the handle for a fleeting half-second as something cold and jagged coiled tight behind his ribs, then he pushed it open with quiet resolve.

The room unfolded large and private, awash in afternoon light pouring through tall windows onto a distant garden no one here would ever tread again.

Same flowers like the ones he had were wilting on the sill with brown-curling petals already whispering apologies for their decay while a muted television flickered unnoticed and monitors hummed their mechanical lullaby beside the bed—tracking heartbeats, blood pressure, oxygen in the steady rhythm of a body that had long since surrendered its fight.

There in the bed, propped against a fortress of pillows like a fragile doll someone refused to admit was beyond mending, lay his mother—painfully, grotesquely thin, not the elegant starvation of fashion plates but the hollowed

ravages of something devouring her from within, skin taut over protruding bones with collarbones thrusting like dagger hilts.

Her wrists were so brittle they seemed liable to shatter under a wrong glance, her dark hair streaked prematurely gray and hanging limp against the pillow while the softened hospital gown draped shamefully loose over vanished curves, each shallow breath costing her dearly as ribs pressed visibly against the fabric in labored rise and fall.

She resembled a once-beautiful woman someone had begun erasing stroke by wasting stroke, yet the instant her eyes found him, her entire face ignited with that desperate, trembling joy known only to those who tally time in visit-spaced heartbeats and morphine haze.

“Phei!”

The word escaped thin and breathless, cracking at the edges as she strained to sit straighter—wincing sharply against inner protest but pushing through regardless.

One trembling hand bracing the mattress while the other stretched toward him like he alone remained solid in her dwindling world, tendons cording stark in her neck and chest heaving with the sheer effort.

“Hello, Mother.”

He crossed the room in three strides, placing the fresh flowers on the side table with deliberate care before leaning down to press a kiss to her forehead—her skin papery and overly warm, dry beneath his lips, carrying that faint, stubborn scent of sickness despite the room’s lavender veil.

She cupped his face instantly with both hands, her bony fingers gripping with surprising desperation as she turned his head left then right, drinking him in through eyes brimming with that fierce, unflinching love only a dying mother perfects; up close, he saw the yellow tinge in her sclera, the cracked thinning of her lips.

“Look at you,” she breathed, voice fracturing at the edges. “You’ve changed so much—your face, your shoulders. Phei, you’ve grown. What happened while you were away? What did you do?”

He let out a low, dark chuckle.

“Made a deal with a devil. He’s real apparently.”

Her eyes sparked with weary mischief. “A good devil or a bad one?”

“Jury’s still out

. Benefits are excellent. The terms and conditions are murder.”

She swatted his arm—a feeble tap that couldn’t bruise a child—yet it held all the maternal reprimand left in her wasting frame.

“Always joking. Never a straight answer. You’ve been like this.”

“I have been always charming.”

“You’ve always been nightmare you little devil,” she rasped, the words crumbling into a wet, rattling cough that gripped her entire body, curling her forward with a fist pressed to her mouth as her shoulders heaved, each hack deeper and wetter than the last.

Dark flecks stained her knuckles while her frail form convulsed and the monitors spiked in shrill protest, the IV line straining against the bruised vein on her hand.

Phei moved without hesitation—adjusting pillows, steadying her shoulders with gentle hands, reaching for the water glass in the familiar rhythm of someone who had performed this ritual far too many times.

She waved him off with a weak gesture, eyes watering as she gasped for air that barely filled her chest, the sound a pitiful ragged whistle shrinking the room around them.

“I’m fine,” she wheezed. “Don’t hover.”

But he hovered anyway—of course he did—because witnessing your ’mother’s’ body devour itself from within while she still summoned strength to scold you was a cruel cosmic irony that twisted the gut and begged for both laughter and escape.

“You’re doing it again,” she murmured hoarsely once the cough released her.

“Doing what again?”

“The fussing. You fuss worse than Diana.”

“Diana doesn’t fuss enough. Last time I was here the curtain rod was loose and nobody had fixed it.”

“You fixed it yourself. With a pen and a hair clip.”

“And it’s still holding, isn’t it?”

She shook her head. Smiling. The exasperation was its own language between them—built over years, not weeks.

The language of a woman who had watched a boy grow up in visits. Who’d seen him arrive the first time to her house—small, bruised in places he thought his sleeves covered, with eyes too old for his face and a voice too quiet for his age—and had decided, in whatever silent way mothers decide things, that this one was hers.

He hadn’t been, then. Not by blood or paper or any of the ways that society measured belonging.

But she’d decided.

And Phei had let her.

“Your hair’s longer,” she said, reaching up to tug a dark strand that had fallen across his forehead. “Makes you look older. Handsome.”

“Was I not handsome before?”

“You were scrawny. There’s a difference.”

“Brutal.”

“Honest. I’ve always been honest with you. Someone has to be.” Her eyes softened. “But truly—look at you. Your shoulders. Your jaw. Something’s changed, Phei. Not just growing up. Something else.”

He sat on the edge of her bed—careful not to disturb the wires, the IV line, the delicate machinery keeping her body in conversation with the monitors.

He took her hand and held it in both of his the way he always did—her thin fingers disappearing between his palms like something he was trying to keep warm.

Like if he let go, the last bit of her might slip away with the next shallow breath.

“I’m getting stronger,” he said. Simply. “That’s all.”

“That’s not all, is it?”

“It’s all I can tell you right now.”

She studied him. That look—the one that saw past his smiles and his deflections and his carefully constructed charm and found the real thing underneath.

The scared, stubborn, furiously loving boy.

“You’d tell me if you were in trouble.”

“I’d tell you if I was in trouble I couldn’t handle.“

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he agreed. “But it’s the best I’ve got.”

She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. A conversation that didn’t need words—the shorthand of two people who had been having the same argument for years and had learned to end it in the same place every time.

I worry.

I know.

I can’t stop.

I know.

Be careful.

Always.

“Also, where’s the fun in straight answers?” he said again. Quieter this time.

****

A/N:I have $20 for who can guess who this mother is… today!