My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 483: Eleanor, Phei, Maya and The Monster!
Phone-first, face-second, full-body collision with what felt like a wall made of warm muscle and expensive fabric.
She stumbled. Caught herself. Looked up.
Purple eyes.
That was the first thing. Before the face registered. Before her brain assembled the features into something recognisable. Just — purple. Vivid. Impossible.
Looking down at her with an expression of mild amusement, the way you’d look at a kitten that had just headbutted your shin.
Phei?
Of course.
Of course it’s him.
He turned fully — unhurried, unbothered, the collision having affected him about as much as a light breeze affects a cathedral — and smiled.
Not the full smile the one she’d seen him deploy on the screaming women and the selfie-seekers.
Something smaller. Quicker.
The polite, easy smile of a man who’d been bumped into by a stranger and genuinely didn’t mind.
"You’re fine," he said. A very sweet, soft calming voice. Warm. Amused in a way that didn’t feel like mockery. "Go on ahead."
This was her fisrt time hearing his voice this close... and by the gods, it was—
He stepped aside and gave her room.
He didn’t linger or stare. Didn’t do any of the things the women in this lobby spent hours praying he would do to them.
Just — moved. Made space. Let her pass.
Beside him, a girl with silver hair was smiling.
Not at Phei. At Eleanor. At Eleanor’s face, specifically —which Eleanor could feel was doing something mortifying.
Flushed. Wide-eyed.
The face of a woman who had just collided with the most talked-about man in Paradise and was handling it with all the grace of a startled deer on ice.
"I— sorry," Eleanor managed. "I wasn’t — I was looking at my phone, I didn’t —"
She was staring.
She realised it too late. She was standing there, phone still clutched to her chest instead of his back, staring at him. Not moving—walking.
Not doing any of the things a normal, functioning human being did after bumping into someone and receiving permission to carry on.
Just — standing. Looking at purple amethyst eyes and a jawline that should be classified as a public safety hazard and wondering why the air suddenly tasted different.
She didn’t move.
The silver-haired girl glanced past Eleanor’s shoulder. Something shifted in her expression — still smiling, still warm, but a new awareness clicking into place behind her eyes.
"Phei," she said softly, touching his arm.
A nod toward the entrance.
Eleanor followed the girl’s gaze. A group of four women had just walked through the lobby doors — moving together, beautiful, purposeful, heading directly toward them with the synchronised confidence of people who owned the room and everything in it.
Phei’s arm found the silver-haired girl’s shoulders — easy, natural, pulling her close as they turned — and they walked away.
Together.
Toward the four women.
Without looking back.
Eleanor watched them go.
She’d first seen him on a screen. At the airport. The day she arrived — exhausted, hollow, dragging her shame through Paradise International like carry-on luggage she couldn’t check.
Every screen in the terminal had been showing his face.
Every woman in the building had been losing her mind. And she’d stood there, jet-lagged and miserable, and thought just a boy, just Paradise being Paradise, nothing to do with me.
Then the lobby.
Day after day. Her corner chair. Her unread book. And him — moving through this building like it was his kingdom and everyone in it his willing subject.
She’d watched him smile at women who would have cut off limbs for his attention. Watched him walk past her a dozen times without once — not once — registering that she existed.
She was furniture to him. Background noise.
Another anonymous resident in a building full of people who orbited him like he was the sun and they were just rocks too stupid to know they were burning.
She’d told herself she was observing. Studying the phenomenon. The detached anthropologist taking field notes on Paradise mating rituals from a safe distance.
But she’d been watching. Every time. And without realizing it she knew his walk now — the unhurried stride, the way his shoulders moved, the particular angle of his jaw when he smiled at someone.
She knew which private elevator he used. Knew roughly what time he came through. Knew the silver-haired girl was always close, and the other women rotated like a carousel of faces she couldn’t keep straight and didn’t want to.
She knew too much about someone she didn’t care about.
And now she’d walked into his back like one of them.
Like one of those women she’d been silently judging from her chair for seven days. The ones who manufactured accidents — dropped phones, spilled coffees, perfectly timed stumbles — just to create a moment of contact.
A reason for him to look.
A chance to stand in his gravity and feel what it was like to be seen.
Walking into his back was the oldest and cheap trick in the book. The most common.
The most transparent.
The absolute lowest rung of the please notice me ladder.
And she’d done it.
By accident, yes. Genuinely, authentically, by complete accident — she’d been looking at her phone, she hadn’t seen him, she was distracted, it meant nothing.
But he didn’t know that.
He’d looked at her the way he looked at all of them. Smiled that quick, polite, it’s okay, carry on smile — the one designed for fans, for strangers, for the women who orbited him like moths around a flame and needed to be redirected gently before they burned.
He’d categorised her.
Filed her under: another one.
And moved on.
No wonder he hadn’t spared her a second glance.
Eleanor hissed through her teeth.
"Arrogant," she muttered, jabbing the elevator button harder than necessary. "Insufferable. Self-important. Womanizing—"
The elevator doors opened. She stepped inside. Stabbed her floor number.
"— pretty-faced, purple-eyed, couldn’t-be-bothered-to-even —"
The doors closed.
She pressed her back against the wall. Closed her eyes. Let the ascending hum of the elevator fill the space where her dignity used to be.
She was here to apologise to the man who’d assaulted her.
She didn’t have time for boys with purple eyes and smiles that meant nothing.
Nothing.
The elevator climbed.
Eleanor WitchBourne went back to her room.
And didn’t think about him again.
At all.
Not even once.
****
In one of the dark alcoves off the main lobby — an architectural nook that existed in buildings like this for people who preferred to observe rather than be observed — a woman stood perfectly still.
She’d been there for some time. Long enough that the shadows had accepted her as one of their own.
Long enough that the staff who passed within feet of her position didn’t register her presence.
Long enough that the security cameras, if they’d been pointed in her direction, would have captured nothing but an empty corner and the faint suggestion of something expensive.
She’d watched the whole thing.
The girl bumping into him. His smile. The silver-haired one steering him away. The British girl standing there — staring, flustered, furious at herself — before retreating to the elevator with her pride dragging behind her like a broken wing.
The woman chuckled.
Low. Private. A sound that started and ended in the throat and never reached the air properly — more vibration than noise.
Interesting. That girl was interesting.
Not for the reasons most women in this building were interesting — not for their money or their connections or their desperate, clawing desire to stand in the boy’s light.
No.
The British one was interesting because she was angry. Genuinely angry. At him. At herself.
At the fact that she’d been affected at all.
Anger like that was rare in Paradise when it was Phei.
Th other interesting thing was the girl’s hidden bloodline and the connection to the Little Prodigy.1
The woman stepped out of the alcove. Smoothly. Silently. A movement that belonged to predators and dancers and things that had been moving through crowds unseen since before crowds had a name.
The lobby lights caught her for one brief moment as she crossed toward the far exit — long black hair like poured midnight, dark coat, dark dress, the quiet click of heels on polished marble.
And beneath those heels — visible only if you looked down, which no one ever did, because looking down meant taking your eyes off the rest of her and that felt like a mistake the hindbrain wouldn’t allow — the signature sole.
Shantel.
Black gold inlaid beneath.
The woman disappeared through the far doors and into the Paradise evening without looking back.
The lobby staff didn’t remember seeing her.
They never did.
Do you guys still remember the only person who calls Phei, Little Prodigy? OOPPSSS I put it in the title😂😂
