My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 313: The Smell of Secrets

"By the way, did you smell that?"

Elena had stopped mid-stride, nose wrinkling, head tilting like a curious cat who’d just caught the scent of tuna-flavored betrayal—

Phei looked around the garden. Hedges. Fountains. Perfectly manicured rose bushes glowing under the estate’s amber lights like they were judging him personally for every sin he’d committed in the last hour.

"Smell what?" Play dumb. Play dumb. Play fucking dumb. Channel every bad actor in every bad movie ever made. Sell it, you beautiful disaster.

"That... smell." She turned back toward the office building they’d just left, eyes narrowing like she was trying to solve a murder with her nostrils alone. "In my mom’s office. It was... weird. Like..."

Like your mother’s pussy juice and my cum soaking into her desk like a crime scene souvenir that’s gonna need industrial-strength Febreze and a priest.

"No," he said flatly, voice so casual it should’ve come with a warning label. "Didn’t notice anything. Who cares? Gardens smell like gardens. Flowers. Dirt. Rich people money. Standard Tuesday night aroma profile."

Elena stopped walking.

Turned to face him.

Blocked his path like a pint-sized roadblock with daddy issues, platinum hair, and a nose that could probably detect guilt at fifty paces.

She studied his face—really studied it—those sharp blue eyes tracking across his features like she was reading something written in fine print on his soul. Her head tilted. Her lips pursed. She seemed to be replaying something in her mind.

The office. The scattered papers. The flushed look on her mother’s face.

That smell.

Phei kept his expression blank.

Nothing to see here. Just a normal visit. Just an apology letter. Just your mom riding me like she was trying to win the Kentucky Derby on my dick. Move along, princess. Nothing suspicious. Definitely not the scent of intergenerational sin hanging in the air like cheap incense at a family reunion gone wrong.

She shook her head slowly. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Snorted softly.

"Weird," she murmured, turning back around. "Just... weird."

And then she was walking again, deeper into the gardens, platinum hair swaying with each step like it was personally mocking him for thinking he’d gotten away with anything.

Phei exhaled.

Close. Too fucking close. One more sniff and she’d have smelled the guilt dripping off me like cheap cologne. Note to self: next time you fuck the matriarch, maybe invest in industrial-grade air freshener.

Or a hazmat suit.

It was night, but the Ashford compound made night feel like a suggestion rather than a fact.

Lights everywhere. Warm amber and soft white, buried in hedges, lining pathways, illuminating fountains and statues and perfectly trimmed topiaries that looked like they’d been sculpted by angels with anger management issues and unlimited budgets.

The kind that made sure nothing escaped sight.

Including Elena.

Walking ahead of him now, occasionally skipping a step or two when something caught her attention—a flower, a butterfly, a thought she found amusing.

And every time she skipped, her uniform skirt bounced. Rode up. Gave him glimpses of her inner thighs. The edge of those white cotton pantie and still managed to look innocent while screaming "bend me over the nearest fountain."

He sighed.

What the fuck am I doing here?

He didn’t understand what Elena wanted from him right now. It wasn’t sex—he was sure of that. The energy was wrong. No charged glances, no strategic touches, no slow escalation toward something darker.

She just seemed to... want to walk with him?

Talk with him?

Spend time with him?

Which made no fucking sense.

In the ten years Phei had been in Paradise, he’d never spent even a minute alone with Elena Ashford.

Never talked to her for more than sixty seconds at a stretch.

Never been in her vicinity for more than once a month—sometimes he went entire seasons without being within twenty feet of her.

And that is the sick joke of it, wasn’t it?

These kids—Elena, Marcus, Sierra, Valentina, all the Legacy heirs—they’d grown up together. Not just classmates. Not just neighbors in the same gated community. They were practically raised together.

Birthday parties at five. Sailing lessons at seven. Cotillion rehearsals at twelve.

Their parents had thrown them into the same gilded playpen since before they could walk, grooming them to inherit empires side by side, forging alliances in sandbox diplomacy that would one day become boardroom wars.

They shared memories Phei would never have.

Inside jokes from summers in the Hamptons. Nicknames earned at ski chalets in Aspen. The easy, careless intimacy of people who’d seen each other in diapers, in braces, in every awkward phase of growing up rich and beautiful and destined for greatness.

Childhood friends.

If you could call it that.

More like childhood co-conspirators. Children raised in the same golden cage, taught the same rules, groomed for the same games. They knew each other’s tells, each other’s weaknesses, each other’s secrets—because they’d been watching each other since before they knew what watching meant.

And Phei?

Phei had been here too.

He’d arrived at four years, dragged into Paradise by parents who were still alive then, still together, still pretending they belonged among these titans. He’d attended some of the same parties. Sat in the same elementary classrooms. Breathed the same rarefied air.

But he’d never been one of them.

Just not a charity case then.

He was the stranger. The outsider. The boy who appeared from nowhere and existed on the margins—present but not included, visible but not seen. The Legacy kids had their orbit, their gravity, their closed circle of mutual history.

And Phei had always been on the outside of that circle, nose pressed against glass he couldn’t break.

Only when his parents died and Maxtons took him in, things had changed.

And ten years of that.

Ten years of watching Elena Ashford from across crowded rooms, across manicured lawns, across the unbridgeable distance between people who belonged and people who didn’t.

She kept to herself in public. Always surrounded by the other princesses when she wasn’t. A creature glimpsed from a distance, like a rare bird you spotted once and then spent years trying to see again.

Only recently—only while he was becoming whatever he was becoming now—had he started seeing her more often. A few times a week, maybe. But always from afar. Girl didn’t even share classes with him.

Even the ones she was supposed to share with him, she somehow wasn’t in.

So, this?

Walking through her family’s gardens at night, making small talk about flowers and school and nothing in particular?

This was more alien to him than the spontaneous sexual encounters he’d been having with MILFs and teacher lately and the very empress of the Ashford empire, her mother.

Okay, "lately" meant today.

But still. Lately.

Point was; this made no literal sense.

Unless she was softening him up. Getting his guard down. Preparing him for her games.

That was the Elena he knew.

The Elena from the rumors.

The Elena who had smelled sex in that office immediately—because she’d watched, orchestrated, arranged so many threesomes and foursomes and orgies and sex parties that she could probably identify the specific position by scent alone.

The princess who collected boys like trading cards and passed them around her inner circle for entertainment.

That was the Elena he knew.

And he was afraid he couldn’t see her as anything else.

But still.

He didn’t hate her or have anything against her.

That wasn’t weird.

Apart from her sex reputation—which, rumors said, existed despite her still being a virgin, just a spectator, never a participant—Elena was unlike the other princesses.

She’d never looked at him the way they did.

Not before. Not in those rare moments when they’d occupied the same space. She’d never had that look—the one that said servant or beneath me or invisible.

She’d just... not looked at him much at all like the way others did. And she did that to everyone.

So, despite the fact that she might be prepping him for some elaborate trap—

—Phei didn’t exactly hate being with her right now.

Okay, that came out weird.

Point was: Elena seemed to want his company. And normally, Phei might have gone on with this and actively court her into becoming his woman.

But right now?

Right now, I want to get the fuck out of this place.

Fifteen minutes.

That’s how long he endured it.

Fifteen minutes of walking through endless gardens, making conversation about nothing—her favorite flowers (orchids), his favorite subjects and hers, whether the school cafeteria had gotten worse (obviously), what he thought of Paradise’s weather (it existed).

Fifteen minutes before he couldn’t take it anymore.

"Hey," he said, stopping. "I just remembered—I’ve got a job interview. Part-time thing. I should probably head out."

Elena turned. Blinked.

"Oh." Something flickered across her face—disappointment? understanding?—before she nodded. "Right. Of course. Money stuff."

She said money stuff the way someone might say dental work. Necessary. Unpleasant. Not something she’d ever personally experienced but vaguely aware others dealt with it.

"I’ll walk you to the gate," she said. "The back one, through the gardens. It’s faster."

Perfect.

That was exactly what he’d been hoping for.

Because Phei had figured out something important in the last fifteen minutes: the safest way to get out of this compound unarmed and scam the system off its rewards, is with the princess herself.

The guards wouldn’t stop her.

The staff wouldn’t question her.

And whoever else was lurking in these manicured shadows—waiting, watching, planning god-knows-what—wouldn’t dare touch a hair on his head while she was escorting him out.

She was his shield.

His safe passage.

His ticket to the gate without incident.

Smart, he thought. Use the princess to escape the princess’s domain.

High above the gardens, perched on a rooftop overlooking the winding paths, the Consort watched the two figures walking toward the back gate.

She snorted softly.

Clever boy.

Then she moved.