My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 947: Misbehaving Cat

Phei’s body reacted before politeness could dress itself properly.

The anchor came in with that broad televised smile still stretched across his face, one hand extended, both arms opening just enough to disguise the ambush as hospitality — and Phei sidestepped him on pure instinct, avoiding him the way he’d avoid a blade rather than a greeting.

It was a small movement, graceful enough that it should have passed for accident.

But the anchor had committed too fully to the performance; he’d leaned forward expecting contact, and the cameras to drink in warmth and ease and masculine camaraderie manufactured for public consumption — and his own balance betrayed him with theatrical cruelty.

For one sharp second, the man almost fell on stage with camera capturing everything live.

The variety of almost that became a meme before the evening news had finished pretending to be respectable journalism.

Phei’s hand shot out before the anchor could complete his descent into humiliation and caught the man by the back of the collar effortlessly, his fingers closed around the expensive fabric and hauling him upright just enough to keep his body from meeting the stage — clean, quick, almost brutally casual, like lifting a misbehaving cat away from a vase it had every intention of murdering.

The anchor jerked backward, shoes scuffing against the platform, and for a breath the whole garden held its tongue while the cameras drank every second of it, machines built specifically to preserve other people’s discomfort and frankly thriving at the job before Phei let go.

The anchor steadied himself, tugging his jacket back into line with a smile that arrived a fraction too late and a shade too sharp at the edges, while Phei exhaled softly.

The microphone clipped to his shirt caught the sigh with offensive clarity.

"Sorry," Phei said with just enough boyish awkwardness layered into it to survive public inspection. "I didn’t see you there. I’ve been shooting all day. I’m a little tired."

It sounded harmless and almost apologetic.

But the damage was done, and both of them knew precisely who’d taken it.

The anchor smiled with a flicker of triumph buried beneath the practiced charm — because from the audience’s angle, the cameras’ angle and the delicate little organs of public judgment already twitching awake, Phei had stepped away from a man trying to greet him out of arrogance.

A trap small enough to fit inside etiquette, and somehow uglier for it.

Phei thought about the loss away without heat; he’d given up the first exchange. Fine. He’d lost openers before.

The thing about letting an opponent take the first hand was how thoroughly it convinced them they understood the game; each angel since he arrived for this so-called interview he was being targeted on his weal points, first was him making Melissa and her daughter’s situation with Maxtons public knowledge and now this.

This was no interview; the man was openly doing everything in his power to make Phei the bad person here.

’This is why I hate this public shit.’

The anchor returned to his seat with exaggerated composure, gesturing toward the opposite chair with professional grace as though his near-collapse had been choreographed into the opening all along.

"Please, Mr. Ryujin Tiamat. Have a seat."

Phei smiled and took the chair across from him, settling with an unhurried ease that quietly informed every eye in the garden that he was not, in fact, the nervous party here. The stage lights warmed his face and the cameras angled in.

The small audience sat beneath the moonlit air waiting for either charm or blood, content with whichever arrived first.

Interviews really were fascinating things — dress an interrogation in good enough lighting and society agreed to call it media.

The anchor leaned back, fingers resting loose around the question cards in his hand, though Phei doubted he needed them.

He’d polished these knives himself provided by whoever paid him to do this; men like this rarely misplaced their own cutlery.

"I must admit," the anchor began, arranging his features into a thoughtful expression so artificial it deserved its own extended warranty, "when I first heard certain rumors about the Young Master of the mysterious Ryujin Tiamat family, I assumed they had to be exaggerated."

Phei’s smile didn’t move. "Rumors usually are; that’s the entire appeal."

A light ripple of laughter moved through the audience but the anchor only widened his smile.

"I heard," he continued, "that you were arrogant. That you disliked touching men you considered... lesser than you." He let the word settle with careful ugliness, then laid a hand flat over his chest in mock humility. "Men like me, perhaps. But seeing and experiencing it for myself, I almost can’t believe such arrogance could live in someone so young, Mr. Ryujin Tiamat."

The garden went still in the particular way crowds managed when they’d sensed something improper had been said and were waiting, politely, for permission to react to it. In the front rows Phei felt his people stiffen — felt it rather than saw it, because he didn’t look.

Instead, he smiled at the anchor, soft, and the softness should have alarmed the man considerably more than anger would have.

"If I thought you were insignificant," Phei said, mild as milk, "I wouldn’t have bothered saving you from falling on your face in front of everyone."

A few sharp inhales from the audience, someone coughed into a fist — the coward’s dialect of laughter.

The anchor’s eyes flickered. "I said lesser," he corrected smoothly, though his jaw had tightened by a degree. "Not insignificant."

Phei gave a small shrug. "Potato poh-tah-to."

The disbelief that crossed the anchor’s face was almost a work of art.

For half a second the man seemed genuinely unable to decide whether to be offended, delighted, or quietly grateful that Phei had just handed him an even better angle — but his expression resolved into the rehearsed astonishment of his trade, eyebrows climbing feeding the cameras exactly the morsel they’d come to be fed.

"So it does make you feel less important?" he asked, turning slightly so the question carried to Phei and the audience both. "Making contact with other people. Does physical contact with ordinary men lower your noble status somehow?"

Phei looked at him for a quiet moment, and the silence that followed was not empty. It thickened and pooled around the stage and made the garden lights feel a touch too bright, the cameras a touch too hungry and the audience a touch too complicit in whatever was being done to them.

Then he shook his head slowly — not in anger, but in a disbelief so calm it was somehow more damaging.

"I can’t believe this is what you brought me down here for."

The anchor’s smile held, though his fingers shifted against the cards.

Phei leaned back, one ankle settling over the opposite knee with lazy grace, his voice pleasant enough, layered with Charm Speech that no one could accuse him of hostility without sounding desperate themselves.

"All of this. The stage. The cameras. The audience. That whole dramatic introduction. And somehow, we open with you trying to embrace me without asking, nearly going down, and then converting your failed greeting into a moral investigation." he paused.

"One might almost think it was all staged."