My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 949: Ashworth’s Favor

Of course, Phei only said what they wanted to hear.

Not everything he said was false, which was the useful part. Lies were fragile little things, especially beneath cameras and lights and an audience eager to smell blood like respectable vultures in formal wear.

Half-truths, on the other hand, were sturdier creatures; they carried enough bone from reality to stand upright on their own, and dressed beautifully enough, they could stroll straight through public judgment without anyone stopping them at the door.

That was why Phei answered the way he did — not because the anchor had extracted honesty from him through clever questioning (God forbid; the man was about as subtle as a knife wrapped in perfume) but because Emily and Ashworth had already settled, between them, on the direction this interview needed to travel.

Ashworth wanted it to mark the era of change beginning at Ashford Elite Academy.

And really — who didn’t already know how things worked inside that famous academy? The old family names drifting through the corridors like hereditary diseases in expensive shoes. The teachers who had perfected the art of pretending blindness was professionalism whenever a Legacy heir turned cruelty into a team sport.

Ashford Elite Academy had never been merely a school. It was a palace of ranking, a civilised hunting ground where power learned its table manners before adulthood, everyone knew it;

Especially the ones who denied it — denial was only guilt wearing perfume and praying nobody noticed the smell underneath.

Phei’s story, shaped correctly, could serve Ashworth’s purpose beautifully. The charity case turned blade. The bullied boy standing against the hierarchy. The academy forced, in public, to look at what it had let happen beneath its marble floors and polished banners.

A new era needed a symbol, and unfortunately for Phei, symbols rarely got to sleep properly.

They got dragged onto stages, photographed under suspicious lighting, and questioned by men whose smiles had plainly been purchased wholesale from moral bankruptcy at a discount.

Still — he’d never give them the true reasons behind any of it.

Not to a television audience that was ravenous for tragedy and violently allergic to complexity.

So he answered as intended, letting the narrative drift where Ashworth wanted it to drift, while Emily’s calm voice murmured occasionally through the tiny earpiece tucked against his ear — telling him which angle to brush, which bruise to press, which door to ease open just wide enough that the public could catch the scent of the rot behind it.

He trusted that voice completely, which was its own quiet remark on Emily:

The girl carried more horrors behind her composed little face than anyone on that stage suspected — he’d seen the tremor in the car when the three boys’ names came up — and yet here she was, running point on a live broadcast against the most powerful family on Earth without her pulse climbing a single beat.

People kept underestimating Emily Hartwell and Maya and they kept being wrong.

The anchor circled through several softer questions first, easing the audience back into comfort, letting the earlier tension dissolve beneath talk of basketball and school culture and public reaction.

Then, once the stage felt safe again he leaned in slightly and returned to the place he’d clearly been circling all along.

"You mentioned bullying at Ashford Elite Academy," the anchor said, smooth and conversational, though his eyes had sharpened. "Does that mean all the Legacy boys bullied you, Mr. Ryujin Tiamat? Even Marcus Heavenchild himself?"

Phei scoffed softly.

’There it is; the golden halo, lowered gently down over Marcus’s head.’

Of course there was no evidence anywhere of Marcus bullying him directly — not in the crude, obvious manner lesser villains favoured when they lacked imagination and legal teams.

Marcus Heavenchild had never needed to dirty his own hands when so many others were lining up to bloody their hands on his behalf.

Phei smiled lightly and let the silence stretch until the audience leaned into it without realising they had.

"Say, Mr. Noah, I can call you Noah, right?" he said and the man nodded. "When a wolf pack tears into its prey — does the alpha need to bite first for everyone to know whose hunt it is?"

The anchor’s expression flickered. Phei went on, pleasant and unhurried, his voice pitched to sound philosophical rather than accusatory.

"That was the entire point of a hierarchy. Kings did not personally chase peasants across fields with pitchforks. They kept soldiers for that, tax collectors for that and priests for that."

And when civilization was feeling especially disgusting; public relations departments for that, too.

"Power rarely moves with its own hands when there are loyal ones standing nearby, desperate to prove their usefulness. The leader doesn’t always have to strike. Sometimes he only has to stand there, and watch, and let everyone around him understand precisely what would please him."

A murmur moved through the audience realizing the ground beneath their feet had quietly narrowed to a ledge.

The anchor laughed in disbelief, though it came a beat too fast and carried the brittle polish of a man trying to make his own unease sound absurd. "So what you’re suggesting is that the other Legacy boys were Marcus Heavenchild’s — minions? That they simply did his bidding?"

Phei shrugged, almost lazily. "Aren’t they all?"

The anchor blinked. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Simple." Phei leaned back, the stage lights resting beautifully across his face and insulting everyone else in the garden by comparison. "Everyone knows the Preston family owns most of the Media Industry worldwide. That’s not a secret — it’s practically common knowledge, though people tend to say it softly, because apparently truth becomes less dangerous if you whisper it.

"But everyone also knows the Prestons don’t publish anything that matters without first considering whether the Heavenchilds approve or if it would impact Heavenchilds somehow. This network specifically is sixty percent owned by the Heavenchild family. Isn’t it?"

The garden changed again.

The audience didn’t erupt — audiences rarely erupted once money entered the conversation. Instead they tightened. Shoulders shifted. Heads turned a careful few degrees.

People glanced toward the cameras as though abruptly remembering that cameras had owners, and those owners had owners, and that every one of those strings climbed upward into hands far too clean to ever be photographed pulling anything.

A few faces in the crowd went deliberately, professionally blank — always a delightful sign that the truth had walked into a room and everyone present was quietly calculating how much unemployment they could personally survive.

The anchor’s smile strained at the corners. "That’s a very broad interpretation of media ownership, Mr. Ryujin Tiamat. Networks have editorial independence. Professional standards. Internal policies—"

"Of course," Phei said gently. "And dogs wear collars for the fashion."