My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 533: The Family Price!!!

The Price Mansion’s dining hall could seat sixty people without breaking a sweat.

This morning, it seated twelve — and even that felt like way too many warm bodies trapped in a room this ice-cold and silent.

The long mahogany table stretched endlessly like a dark river of judgment, absolutely groaning under a breakfast spread that could feed a small village: silver platters loaded with eggs prepared four different ways, smoked salmon flown in fresh from Norway that very morning, bread still warm from ovens lit at four a.m., and crystal pitchers of juice squeezed from fruit that had been hanging on trees in the Price family’s private orchards just twelve hours earlier.

At the far end — separated by deliberate distance, by architecture, and by the invisible but ironclad hierarchy that ruled every inch of this mansion — sat the Immediates. Cousins. Second sons of second sons.

Branch family nobodies who lived under the Price roof because proximity to power was its own currency... even when that proximity came with the very clear memo that you ate at the far end, spoke only when spoken to, and never forgot which end of the table you belonged on.

They weren’t worth looking at.

They knew it. The family knew it. The staff who served them slightly smaller portions definitely knew it.

The real breakfast — the one that actually mattered — happened at the head of the table.

Fenris Price sat at the center like a king holding court in a room specifically built to remind everyone else they were not kings.

Fifty-three years old with silver-streaked dark hair swept back from a face carved by ruthless genetics and maintained by the kind of brutal discipline that came from running a Legacy empire since before his eldest son could walk.

Broad shoulders. Strong jaw.

Eyes the color of wet stone — grey, cold, and revealing nothing.

He ate with the methodical precision of a man who treated breakfast the same way he treated hostile takeovers: efficiently, without sentiment, and with absolute clarity about exactly what he planned to devour.

To his right sat his mother.

The Grandmother.

She had a name. Everyone had a name. But inside these walls she was simply Grandmother or Madame — spoken with the kind of reverence reserved for women who had outlived two generations buried the family enemies in each and still woke up at five a.m. to personally oversee the family’s investment portfolio before breakfast.

Her silver-white hair was cut short and precise. Her face was lined but still strikingly handsome — bones sharp, aristocratic, and still capable of making grown men straighten their spines with one look.

Seventy-eight years old and looked sixty.

Healthy in that terrifying Legacy way — not from doctors or supplements, but from something ancient running thick in the blood that kept the spine straight and the mind lethally sharp long after normal women had gone soft.

Definitely a GILF! If Phei had been here to recruit his first GILF harem member!

She ate in small, precise bites. Unhurried. Like the food would wait for her... because everything else in this world always did.

Beside her — to her left, in the seat that carried its own special weight — sat Abigail.

Abigail Price ate the way she did everything else: without waste. Fork to plate. Plate to mouth. Chew. Swallow. No conversation or commentary. No participation in the circus around her unless she damn well felt like it.

It was rarely worth her time.

Across from Fenris sat his two wives.

The first — the main wife, the one whose ring came first — she sat with the rigid composure of a woman who had spent two decades perfecting the art of looking powerful while actually being the least powerful person at the table.

Beautiful in that expensive, preserved Legacy way.

Hair was immaculate and her makeup flawless too.

Posture a masterpiece of barely-contained tension but she ate while she watched the room with eyes that missed nothing and said even less.

The second wife — younger and softer face but sharper tongue — was not eating.

She was arguing.

"—you’re really just going to sit there?" Her fork hovered uselessly in her hand, untouched for minutes.

Her voice had that dangerous tight pitch — controlled but one breath away from exploding. "After what that boy did to our son? After what he did to Anderson’s face? You’re going to sit here eating eggs like nothing happened?"

She glared at Fenris.

Fenris did not look back.

"The doctors said the scarring will be permanent.Permanent, Fenris. Our son’s face — the face of a Price

— will carry those marks for the rest of his life. And you just sit there like—"

"What if he’s some kind of—" She bit her lip hard. The unsaid words hung thick in the air. What if he’s some kind of monster. What if we can’t fight him. What if the boy who carved our son’s face open with ice and darkness doesn’t answer to money, lawyers, or the Price name.

She didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to.

Andreas finished it for her.

"You mean an awakened being?"

He said it casually, like he was commenting on the weather or asking for the salt. The tone of the eldest son and heir who had already run the cold numbers on this situation and found the answer boring.

"Is it really worth the price to go against an awakened being over Anderson?" Andreas cut a piece of salmon, ate it, chewed, swallowed — like he hadn’t just reduced his brother’s mutilation to a casual cost-benefit analysis over breakfast.

Evan — second son, the one whose name still made Eleanor WitchBourne’s knuckles ache — let out a low chuckle. A small, private but vicious little sound. The laugh of a brother who found his sibling’s suffering genuinely entertaining.

The main wife scoffed at the entire table seeing Evan laugh... she was watching a pot calling a kettle black.

Anderson’s mother finally snapped.

"Is that really what the next heir of this family would say?"

Her voice cracked across the table like a whip. "After what that boy did to your brother? He ruined Anderson’s face, Andreas. He ruined our reputation. What explanation would we give if Anderson—"

"Must I remind you," Andreas said calmly, still not looking up from his plate, "that Anderson ruined the family’s image long before Phei ever touched his face?"

The silence that dropped after that line was sharp enough to draw blood.

Fenris kept eating, slow and deliberate.

The fork in Anderson’s mother’s hand froze mid-air like it had suddenly remembered it was in enemy territory.

"Have seven days erased the fact that your son tainted our family name with his... adventures?" Andreas selected the word with surgical care, the way a master butcher picks the perfect blade before carving.

"It’s shame enough that he was involved in those filthy little acts with the Castellano prince. And they lost the challenge game too. The whole world watched that disaster. Must we also go public with the fact that his face was ruined by the same boy who beat them senseless?"

Anderson’s mother opened her mouth to unleash hell —

But Andreas wasn’t finished. Not even close.

"Let us imagine, just for a fraction of a second," he continued, voice still calm, still conversational, still slicing deeper with every syllable, "that we pursue your precious justice.

"That we report it. That we make a case. That we drag the mighty Price name through every court, every headline, and every circus you’re dreaming of."

He set his fork down with deliberate softness and finally looked her dead in the eyes. "And the truth resurfaces. Of why Phei did what he did."

The silence that followed was so thick you could have spread it on toast.

"That your already disgraced son — your already scandal-ridden, already reputation-destroying son — tried to rape a girl."

The word dropped onto the table like a bloody knife.

Thud.

*****

A/N:I know it’s soon but what do you think of this Andreas dude?