The Seductive Pretty Boy of the Matriarchal World-Chapter 73: A New Route

Chapter 74: A New Route

Elias waved goodbye to Yvonne Quinn and the two doctors, then headed off to his father’s room in such a good mood he was practically skipping.

Yvonne watched his retreating back the entire way down the hall. Only after he disappeared completely at the far end did she finally look away.

It was as if his warmth had lingered behind after he left. Even the air still seemed faintly bright, touched by the afterglow of his cheerfulness.

The other doctor smiled. "Why are you staring so hard? Has our Dr. Quinn finally fallen for someone?"

Yvonne turned and looked at her.

The doctor immediately went quiet.

Behind those glasses, Yvonne’s eyes were calm, rational, and clear.

There was not a trace of infatuation in them.

After splitting up with her colleagues, Yvonne returned alone to her office to rest.

The room suited her almost too well. Everything about it was severe, meticulous, orderly to the point of restraint. Not a single detail sat out of place. The whole space carried the same exacting austerity she did.

She lowered herself into her chair, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

Not long ago, she had finished a procedure. It had not been major, but it had demanded far more precision and discipline than many larger operations. There had been no room for error, not even the slightest lapse in control, and it had drained more of her focus than she cared to admit.

For any experienced lead surgeon, that level of fatigue was manageable.

Still, to prepare for the possibility of another case later, Yvonne needed to recover as much of her energy as she could.

But the moment she closed her eyes, she failed to sink into rest the way she normally did.

Instead, a face rose unbidden through the emptiness of her mind.

Elias.

His eyes were red and damp, but not the version of him from a few minutes ago. In her mind, his cheeks were flushed too, pink and vivid like sunset clouds, the way he had looked the last time she saw him sick with fever.

Put more simply, the face in her mind was a fusion of two separate memories. Elias crying. Elias burning up with fever.

Or, framed another way, Elias with that same gorgeous face ruined by intense pain.

Yvonne had assumed she would forget him.

That earlier encounter had only been a passing interruption, and in a sense, she had been right. Her memory of him had already drifted downward into the deeper layers of her mind, to the place where stray fragments went to die. In all likelihood, she would never have thought of him again in this lifetime.

That was, of course, assuming Elias never appeared in front of her again.

But he had.

And from the look of it, he had not lost interest in her the way she once assumed he would. If anything, the admiration was still there. The longing. The bright, earnest fixation.

How very...

Yvonne’s hands rested on the chair arms. Slowly, imperceptibly, her fingers tightened.

Under her palms, the polished armrests seemed to become a slender throat.

The boy’s expression shifted in her imagination. Pain crept across his face as if the air were being cut off. Then came the tears, spilling down more and more freely.

Yvonne’s eyes snapped open.

Her hands loosened at once.

She lowered her gaze to her own palms and murmured, so softly the room itself nearly swallowed the sound, "How twisted."

After leaving Arthur Hale’s room, Elias exited Longhaven Hospital. He glanced at the new contact in his phone, the corner of his mouth lifting.

"Got her."

The tears had mostly gone to waste, but as long as the outcome was good, then the crying had not been for nothing.

"Oh, right. Go ahead and say whatever you’ve been trying to say."

From the second he left the room, System Theta had been hemming and hawing in the background. It was obvious it wanted to bring something up.

Only then did it finally speak.

[The way you interact with Arthur Hale feels... somewhat off.]

"Off?" Elias’s smile turned faintly mocking. "You think my attitude is the problem when we’re talking about a father who’d rather sell out his own son than give up a comfortable life?"

The system froze.

[...What?]

Elias said flatly, "He’s the patient. You really think he wouldn’t know what his own body feels like? But when I asked how he was doing, he described it like he was on death’s door. Then you look at him, and he doesn’t seem seriously ill at all."

"It’s obvious he’s already made a deal with Serena Blackwood. They’re working together to lie to me. Serena probably promised him all kinds of benefits in exchange for handing me over."

"For a father like that, the fact that I was willing to go see him at all already counts as me doing more than enough."

[But aren’t you worried he’ll tell Serena everything you’ve been doing?]

Elias smiled faintly. "I could stand right in front of Arthur and curse Serena out a thousand times, and he still wouldn’t pass along a single word. Because the second Serena stops wanting me, where exactly is his king’s life supposed to come from?"

Elias had known his foster parents were trash long before now. The original story had made that perfectly clear.

That was also why he had waited until now to visit Arthur.

In fact, if he had not successfully run into Yvonne first and ended up in such a good mood, he probably would not have bothered seeing Arthur at all.

What did it mean to save a world?

In Elias’s eyes, if a world had reached the point where it needed saving, then from the protagonist’s perspective, it was already rotten to the core. Whether it was the trash women in it or the family around him, someone had hurt the protagonist. Probably all of them had.

Even if those people changed later, it was never because they loved him.

It was because he had broken them in.

How could he possibly feel attached to a world like that?

That said, he was still pretty fond of the food each one had to offer.

"Come on. Today’s task is done. Let’s go find something to eat. Once Lucien’s birthday party wraps up tonight, I’ll go look for Liora and the others."

Elias was in a great mood and decided to splurge a little.

He pulled out...

a grand total of fifteen dollars for dinner.

That night, at The Pinnacle Club, two figures stood at the entrance seeing off the departing guests one by one.

A middle-aged woman stood there, looking at Serena Blackwood as she said warmly, "Serena, thank you for your help tonight."

Serena smiled and shook her head. "Of course."

Lucien Hart’s birthday should have been hosted by his mother, but Serena considered herself the person closest to him aside from Mrs. Hart herself. Naturally, she had stepped in without hesitation.

It also made the party livelier. Plenty of people had shown up with the goal of currying favor with Serena in mind.

She did not care about that.

As long as Lucien was happy, nothing else mattered.

Then, without warning, the soft smile on Serena’s face tightened for a fraction of a second.

A slash of silver entered her line of sight.

Giselle Frost, neck long and elegant, moved to walk past her with that same cold, untouchable pride she carried everywhere.

"Miss Frost."

Giselle’s steps halted.

She turned to look at Serena, and the moment their gazes met, the air between them seemed to strike sparks.

The smell of gunpowder without the smoke. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"What?" Giselle asked coolly.

Serena smiled. "Thank you for coming to Lucien’s birthday party."

Giselle’s eyes sharpened, her voice turning colder. "You don’t get to thank me. I didn’t come for anyone but Lucien."

What right did Serena have to say that to her?

What position was she claiming?

Mrs. Hart stood to the side and watched in silence. She knew exactly what the relationship between these two was like. It was not her place to interfere unless things truly started going wrong. But if they did, she would stop them immediately.

No matter what, she was still Lucien’s mother.

They would both give her that much respect.

"All right." Serena gave one last smile.

Then the smile vanished from her face as if it had never existed. Her expression went blank, almost chillingly so.

"In that case, let’s not talk about Lucien." Her voice turned cold and deliberate. "If this is about Elias Kane, then I do have the standing to say something."

She enunciated every word like an order.

"Stay away from Elias."