My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 823: Forbidden Room Behind the Wall

It was not a real draft of air but something in his head; like a cold feeling from a door he thought he had locked long ago.

His mind was like a house he had been fixing up.

Phei had walled off one room on purpose sine the training...

...But now that room had cracked its own door open just a little, and it was waiting patiently — like a ghost that knew he would eventually have to come in and face it.

That room held the road and its secrets strongly...

...The road from ten years ago.

He had been seven years old. Seven. Strapped into the back seat of the car when everything suddenly flipped and crashed.

Phei could vividly see every terrible horror he’d just been forced to see.

He had been screaming a word — a word he had spent the rest of his life trying never to say out loud again:

The terrible sound of metal tearing and breaking, the kind of sound that happens when something strong gives up and shatters:

Then his father’s hand reached up through the smoke and touched his cheek... a touch no one else would ever give him again.

...The cold feeling got sharper.

It wasn’t the special Void-Ice chill that he could control with his power. This was ordinary human cold that sat in the gap between what really happened and what he had allowed himself to remember.

That gap had been slowly growing wider ever since the afternoon fate had decided and started helped him remember more of his past.

Because recently fate had shown, forcefully in its cruelty, him things he had blocked out.

It had reached deeply into time and space and the moment he passed out and had gently pulled back the kind, blurry curtain that protects little kids when something too awful happens; and showed him the truck that hit them, Phei him who was in the truck and exactly how it had ended up on that empty road rushing to end him and his family without even his father able to see or here it coming — the sorcery involved in the accident.

The cold feeling pressed in closer:

Yet it didn’t hurt like a fresh wound but way worse in a quiet way — a steady, heavy pressure from a truth that had been waiting in the corner of his mind since the afternoon.

Now, in the silence of this empty penthouse on a quiet resort island in the middle of the gods know where, it was leaning forward like it was finally ready to speak and haunt him.

’Who sent the truck, Phei?’

He had whispered the same question to himself on other quiet nights.

’Not now. Not yet. Please — not tonight. We have a suit fitting in two hours. I need to be charming and relaxed. Being charming needs good feelings. Good feelings need me not thinking about how someone murdered my parents with a truck. It’s called simple logic. Just wait.’

His brain listened... but only a little. It was like an assistant who politely took the request and then immediately ignored it anyway, already pulling out the old painful file.

The cold feeling grew stronger. It wasn’t unbearable.

If Phei was being honest, it wasn’t even that painful at all.

It felt more like an unwanted visitor who had sat down in the armchair across from him and was waiting calmly — with that annoying patience of someone who has all night — for him to finally start the conversation they both knew was coming.

Who sent the truck? Why was that road so empty to begin with? Why does Harold always seem to know everything? Why does Harold always know? He no longer had to ask these questions because now he knew answers to them all.

Maybe he should call Emily and the others early and fill the silence with noise — three assistants and three boys arguing about whether navy or charcoal suits looked more powerful this season.

’Maybe I should go down to the lobby and make up some errand.’

Or suddenly decide he needed the hotel gym, or a drink at the bar, or anything at all that would distract him from the door in his mind that was slowly opening wider, like a tide that didn’t care about his plans.

’Maybe I should—’

"Dragon!"

A voice called from behind him.

Phei didn’t turn around right away as a weird sensation unfurled around him.

The voice landed in his ear with a sound his body had been quietly remembering and protecting for the few past weeks. It was a voice he had kept safe in some hidden corner of his heart, labeled "do not lower your guard to this."

He had always hoped the universe would be kind enough to bring it keep at her respectable distance.

Tonight, the universe had decided not to be so kind.

The cold feeling pulled back fast — not slowly, but all at once, like something that had been leaning too close and suddenly noticed someone else had entered the room and it didn’t want to stay.

The door in his mind didn’t slam shut (he knew better than to hope for that), but it stepped back and grew quieter at the edge of his thoughts where it stayed when life gave him something better to focus on.

The voice belonged to a person he had thought about for a long time — especially in those early weeks after his powers woke up.

Back then he used to lie awake at night making a very long, very detailed list of everything he wanted to do to this person when he finally got the chance. He had ranked the things on the list while he added more things.

Phei had kept adding until the list was so big and so intense that it probably would have gotten him arrested in most places.

Until this exact moment, he hadn’t expected that list to become real tonight.

The whole penthouse seemed to hold its breath with him.

His shoulders relaxed:

All the heavy, painful weight that had been building in his chest from that old memory simply vanished — gone in an instant. In its place came a sharp, hungry satisfaction; his mind had been drifting toward something painful, and now, by perfect timing, it had been handed something much more interesting instead.

Phei smiled. Slow and quiet.

His evening had just improved substantially, and that long, ranked, revised, legally questionable list in his head had just moved from "maybe someday" to "right now."

Phei turned around.