My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 519: Chao’s Demands: The Time Element
Chapter 519: Chao’s Demands: The Time Element
While the two elder sisters chased their private chaos through the night, the youngest—and by far the most terrifying of the three—served as someone’s silent instrument.
They sat in the back of a discreet coffee house on the edge of Paradise’s old quarter.
Late evening or early night… whatever your English served.
It was the kind of place that kept its lights low and its espresso machine hissing long after respectable people had gone home, a sanctuary for conversations too dangerous for daylight.
The air carried the bitter-sweet burn of dark roast, the faint metallic tang of rain on hot pavement drifting in every time the door opened, and the low, constant murmur of jazz from a speaker someone had forgotten to turn down.
Maya waited in the blacked-out sedan outside, engine idling so softly it was more felt than heard—a low, steady vibration through the soles of their shoes.
Inside, Valentina occupied the head of the small round table like a queen in exile, stirring an untouched cortado with mechanical precision. The tiny spoon made slow, deliberate circles that never quite disturbed the foam; the soft clink-clink-clink was the only sound she allowed herself.
Melissa sat ramrod straight beside her, hands folded in her lap, knees trembling beneath the tablecloth in a rhythm only she could feel—tiny, rapid pulses that made the linen shiver.
Emily perched across from them, laptop half-open like a shield, screen dimmed to the faintest blue glow, fingers hovering but never typing, as though the keys might betray her if she pressed too hard.
Sienna stood apart—near the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the rain-slick street—back straight, shoulders squared, chin lifted just enough to show deference without submission. Rain traced slow, silver paths down the glass behind her, distorting the neon bleed of the streetlights into long, liquid smears.
She was being something Phei would never have believed possible: Polite and obedient.
“Yes, Madam.”
“…”
“It is true, Madam.”
“…”
“I will remember that.”
“…”
“Of course.”
“…”
“I understand completely.”
Her voice was low, measured, each syllable placed with the surgical care of someone who had learned early that survival depended on perfect intonation.
No sarcasm. No edge.
Only the quiet, crystalline obedience of a girl reciting a script written in blood and rehearsed in silence for years.
She held a phone that did not belong to her pressed to her ear—Dravenna’s, matte black and heavier than it looked, as though it carried the weight of every command it had ever transmitted.
She listened. Nodded once. Twice.
The small movements were economical, respectful, almost reverent—chin dipping exactly the right number of degrees, eyes lowered just far enough to signal submission without ever losing peripheral awareness.
Dravenna—the Dean of Ashford Elite Academy, the Dragoness whose jade-and-emerald gaze had ended more careers than most wars—stood two paces away, arms folded loosely, watching.
A faint, genuine smile curved her lips. Rare. Precious. Sienna—the feral youngest, the girl who bowed to nothing and no one—was obeying.
It was like watching a tiger fold its paws and wait for permission to eat.
On the table behind them Melissa was biting her nails—actually biting them—teeth working the edges with the focused, frantic anxiety of someone who had already received her own portion of what Sienna was enduring now.
The soft click-click of enamel on keratin was the only betrayal of her composure.
The Madam—the voice on the other end, the woman whose name was never spoken lightly—had chosen tonight to deliver judgment. One daughter, Sienna lastly.
Dravenna had came first. Then Melissa. Now Sienna.
Personalized lectures, each one calibrated to the precise nature of the failure, delivered with the calm, unhurried cruelty of someone who loved them enough to destroy them if necessary.
Melissa did not know what exact line Sienna had crossed this time—what order she had disobeyed, what boundary she had tested that the Madam had noticed from whatever shadowed distance she observed from.
But the reprimand was thorough.
Sienna’s jaw tightened three times. Her grip on the phone shifted twice—knuckles whitening briefly—yet her voice never rose. Never cracked.
“Yes, Madam. I will correct it immediately. Thank you for your guidance.”
Dravenna had been insufferable about her own call.
The Madam had praised her—and the Jade-eyes dragoness was so insufferable to let them hear it, aloud, on speaker, loud enough for the others to hear every syllable—telling her she had held the line admirably with the Heavenchilds while the others treated her like some leashed wyvern they could collar and command.
Promised retribution.
Promised consequences.
Dravenna had let the praise ring through the coffee shop like a bell.
Then she had switched to earpiece, turned her back slightly, and received the real correction and scolding in private—sticking her tongue out at Melissa and Sienna the moment the line went dead, a flash of pure, juvenile rebellion that lasted exactly long enough to make Melissa choke on her own spit and Sienna’s mouth twitch in the ghost of a smirk.
Emily watched it all with the expression of someone whose entire cosmology was being quietly dismantled brick by brick.
These were some of the most powerful women in Paradise… she’d come to realize Sienna was always in a league no Legacy Princess occupied….
And yet… they were terrified of the voice on that phone.
Sienna lowered the device when the call ended. Turned to face them with the calm, neutral face of a messenger who knows the message will ruin the evening.
“Grandmother says she will notcome.”
Melissa’s entire body sagged forward as though strings had been cut. Dravenna’s shoulders dropped a single measured inch.
“Since we gave our word we would handle the matter ourselves and Phei’s begging had been so convincing
Melissa nearly collapsed into the chair. The bone-deep dread—the suffocating certainty that the Madam would descend on Paradise in person to repair what her daughters had failed to contain—lifted so abruptly that her lungs forgot how to fill.
She slumped back.
Exhaled in a long, shuddering breath. Pressed both hands over her face as though to hold the relief inside her skin.
Dravenna was more composed. She smoothed an invisible crease from the cuff of her sleeve. Tucked a single silver strand behind her ear.
But the relief lived in the softening line of her jaw, in the way her fingers finally stilled, in the barely audible sigh that escaped through her nose.
“But?” Melissa asked, voice muffled behind her palms.
Dravenna lifted one perfect brow and asked too. “But?”
Because they knew.
Every reprieve from the Madam arrived wrapped in a silver lining sharp enough to draw blood.
Sienna shrugged—casual, almost indifferent—the perfect posture of the bearer who has already delivered the worst part.
“But we are to ensurePhei masters his first element within the next month. Restore his emotional control to its previous level. And awaken the second element.”
Melissa exhaled again, shoulders loosening fractionally. Dravenna gave a single, crisp nod.
Manageable.
Brutal, yes.
Demanding in ways that would require every resource they possessed.
But it was within the realm of planning, training, coercion if necessary. Ice mastery. Emotional recalibration.
A second element awakening. Hard but achievable if they—
“The Time Element.”
The words landed like a blade between vertebrae.
Melissa’s hands dropped from her face so fast they slapped the table—loud enough that the barista glanced over, then quickly looked away.
Dravenna’s jade eyes snapped to Sienna—pupils contracting to pinpricks.
Emily looked between them, reading the sudden, electric silence, reading the naked horror that had replaced every other expression in the room.
“The second element she requires him to awaken,” Sienna said, voice still perfectly level, “is Time.”
Because they knew what that meant.
They knew the conditions that had to be met.
They knew the sacrifices that would be demanded.
They knew the impossible, unthinkable orchestration required to force a seventeen-year-old boy to awaken the single most dangerous, most unstable, most forbidden element in recorded existence.
They knew exactly what they would have to do to make it happen.
“No way in hell,” Melissa whispered.
“No way in hell!” Dravenna echoed.
