My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 535: The Awaited Price’s Plans

No warmth or cruelty. Just the simple acknowledgement that she had asked a question she already knew the answer to... and was satisfied the boy had been smart enough to give the right one.

She let him stay on his knees for three long, humiliating seconds.

Then: "Sit down, Anderson."

He sat.

"Punishment for damages," she repeated, tasting the words like fine wine. "And how exactly do you intend to make up for the billions we lost in stock value thanks to your little romance adventures?"

Anderson’s face — scarred half and whole half alike — drained of every drop of color.

Billions.

The word landed on the table like a loaded gun. Not millions. Not a minor dip. Billions. The kind of number that made entire boards resign, shareholders riot, and century-old family legacies crack wide open along fault lines everyone thought were stable.

He had no answer.

She didn’t expect one.

The Grandmother turned toward her granddaughter.

Before she could speak, a sound sliced through the heavy air—low, sharp, and unmistakable.

Evan was cackling.

Not laughing but a full-on cackling — that ugly, barely-suppressed sound of a man who had just watched his younger brother kneel on marble and beg for mercy... and found the entire pathetic performance hilarious.

His shoulders shook. One hand pressed over his mouth.

His eyes were even wet with pure delight, stayed locked on Anderson with the delighted cruelty only a sibling who’d waited years for this moment could manage.

The Grandmother paused.

Turned her head slowly.

Looked at Evan. "What’s so funny?"

The cackling died instantly, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane. Evan’s hand dropped. His spine snapped straight so fast his vertebrae popped.

"I—nothing, Grandmother. I was just—"

"Are you so different from Anderson?"

The question hit with surgical precision. Evan’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Whatever clever deflection he’d been preparing died in his throat.

He tried to reply anyway.

Abigail set her fork down.

The soft clink rang out like a gunshot in the sudden, suffocating silence.

The sound was identical to the Grandmother’s — that soft, deliberate clink — but it carried a completely different frequency.

She looked at Evan.

Just looked with those dark, flat, measuring eyes settled on his face like crosshairs locking onto a target.

Evan paused.

Whatever defence or joke he’d been about to spit out died in his throat. He looked at Abigail’s face and found nothing there to argue with. Nothing to appeal to. Nothing human enough to negotiate with.

He closed his mouth.

Abigail scoffed—a single, quiet exhalation through her nose—and returned to her food like the entire conversation had never happened.

Everyone at the table knew the truth.

Everyone remembered exactly how much time Abigail had wasted moving back and forth for this idiot. The flights. The meetings. The delicate, years-in-the-making negotiations she had conducted with the WitchBournes to arrange the marriage that would finally deliver what the Price family had been waiting centuries for.

The reincarnation of the First WitchBourne Witch.

The dormant power sleeping in Eleanor’s virgin blood. The sacred union that would bind that ancient power to the Price bloodline on the wedding night.

Centuries of waiting. Centuries of patience.

And Evan—this smirking, cackling, self-satisfied fool—had nearly destroyed all of it because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He had walked into Eleanor’s office uninvited and put his hands on her.

Turned a willing bride into a traumatised woman who had beaten him nearly bloody and was now being forced to fly to Paradise just to apologise for defending herself.

If anything, to Abigail and the entire Price Family, Evan was worse than Anderson.

Anderson’s scandal was public, ugly, and had cost billions in stock value. But it was containable. Fixable.

The kind of mess money and time could eventually wash away.

What Evan had nearly cost them was irreplaceable.

The main wife wanted to scoff at all of them. At the Grandmother’s cold calculations. At Andreas’s cost-benefit cruelty. At Evan’s pathetic cackling. At Anderson. At Abigail’s silent, terrifying competence.

At her own husband calmly eating his eggs like the entire world wasn’t burning around them.

They were all busy judging each other—pointing fingers, measuring sins, ranking whose disgrace had cost the family more—and not a single one of them had stopped to consider what they were actually doing.

What this family was actually for. They were scheming to sacrifice a twenty-six-year-old girl. To put a ring on her finger, a Price in her bed, and extract ancient power from her blood on a wedding night she had been coerced into.

Eleanor WitchBourne. Sweet. Innocent. Twenty-six years old. Being traded like livestock by people who ate Norwegian salmon for breakfast and discussed her destruction between bites.

Worse... they did not even bother to send a single apology to the girl their son nearly raped and already moving on to ruin another one’s life forever.

The main wife shook her head, ate her food, and said nothing.

Some battles weren’t worth fighting at this table.

"Abigail," the Grandmother said.

"Yes, Grandmother."

"How is the arrangement progressing?"

"I’ll be meeting with Eleanor WitchBourne in two days. At the island."

The Grandmother nodded. Slow. Measured... she’d been waiting for this particular piece of information the way a general waits for confirmation that the troops are in position.

"Cut her some slack," the Grandmother said.

Abigail’s fork paused—the smallest hesitation.

"Don’t let her apologise to that fool." The Grandmother didn’t even glance at Evan. Didn’t need to. "As was originally planned."

Abigail nodded. "Yes, Grandmother. It would be an insult to the entire female gender if I allowed that girl to apologise for defending herself."

Andreas set his glass down with a soft click. "If anything, we should reward her. She put some sense into Evan’s head that the rest of us have been trying to beat into him for twenty years." He glanced sideways at his brother. "Fucking prick."

Evan stared at his plate like it had personally betrayed him.

The main wife wanted to scoff again. At all of them. At Andreas calling Evan a prick while calmly facilitating the entrapment of a girl whose only crime was being born with the wrong blood.

At the Grandmother’s sudden burst of feminism that extended exactly as far as it served the family’s interests and not one millimetre further. At Abigail nodding along like she wasn’t the chief architect of the whole twisted arrangement.

They were going to be kind to Eleanor.

Not because she deserved kindness.

Because kindness made the sacrifice go down smoother.

She shook her head, ate her food, and stayed silent.

"Fenris," the Grandmother said.

He looked up.

"The meeting with the other Legacy families. That’s in two days as well? At the island also, right?"

Fenris Silverblood—Patriarch of House Price, fifty-three years old, grey-eyed, granite-jawed, and utterly, permanently unreadable — nodded once.

"Yes. Though I’ll be arriving sooner. I have a few things to settle with the Undercroft Tower beforehand."

The table nodded. Undercroft Tower business was Undercroft Tower business. Nobody asked. Nobody was meant to.

"What’s this meeting about, anyway?" Evan asked, trying to sound casual. "All the Legacy Patriarchs? What’s the occasion?"

He said it lightly... desperately trying to re-enter a conversation he had just been exiled from, fishing for relevance at a table that had spent the last ten minutes reminding him he had none.

Three pairs of eyes met across the table.

Fenris. The Grandmother. Abigail.

A glance that lasted less than a second. That carried more information than Evan would process in a year. That said not him, not now, and not ever in a language only the people who actually ran this family spoke.

Fenris returned to his plate.

"Nothing to concern yourself about," he said.

Evan’s jaw tightened. His eyes flicked between his father, his grandmother, and his sister — three faces that had just shut a door in his face without making a single sound.

He picked up his fork.

Ate.

The breakfast continued.

The Immediates at the far end didn’t dare breathe.

The Norwegian salmon was excellent.

And somewhere in a tower forty-three floors above Paradise, a British girl with bruised knuckles and a two-day countdown was stepping into a cold shower, trying very hard not to think about purple eyes.

Little did she know... her sacrifial altar was being prepared.