The Seductive Pretty Boy of the Matriarchal World-Chapter 76: Phantom Dream

Chapter 76: Phantom Dream

There was no way Liora could hear what the two of them were saying from that far away.

Even so, she could see Elias shaking his head over and over.

The distance should have made the rest impossible. She should not have been able to make out his expression, the color in his face, the way his mouth moved. Yet her mind supplied it anyway with merciless clarity: the reddened eyes, the drained pallor, the tremor in his voice, the faint catch of tears he always seemed to wear so naturally in front of Giselle.

That was the version of himself he gave her.

In Liora’s imagination, she could already hear him.

Giselle, I can’t. I can’t get down.

And then Giselle, cool and unhurried as winter glass, would answer, Jump. I’ll catch you.

The fantasy felt so vivid that it might as well have been whispered beside her ear. As it played out in her mind, her pupils tightened sharply, and then the imagined scene became reality. Elias leaped.

He came down from the fence in one brave, reckless drop, and Giselle opened her arms and caught him cleanly. She gave ground only a few steps under the force of it before steadying them both.

It was absurdly beautiful.

A prince falling into a princess’s embrace, the kind of image that belonged in some polished, impossible fairy tale.

The two of them held each other tightly. Even from a distance, it looked as though they were speaking in low voices, sharing the kind of joy reserved for lovers reunited after a long separation.

Then the illusion broke.

The joined silhouette split apart almost at once because the security booth lights snapped on without warning. Giselle had made far too much noise on her arrival. It would have been stranger if the guard had slept through it.

For a moment, Liora’s vision blurred. She blinked several times, and when her sight steadied again, she saw Giselle seize Elias’s hand and run with him toward the car. Before the guard could get there and stop them, the two of them were already gone.

The whole thing had been wonderfully incoherent.

It had begun like catching someone in the act, unfolded like a fairy tale, and ended like an affair.

Liora smiled as she watched the last of it disappear. She was genuinely entertained, though there was still a faint edge of regret beneath her amusement. She had been standing too far from the stage. She had not been close enough to catch every movement, every expression, every line of dialogue.

Her phone vibrated.

She drew a breath, smoothed her expression, and looked down.

The message was from Elias.

It was a photo, and not just any photo. It was a selfie.

In the picture, he was still perched on top of the fence. He looked thoroughly trapped, yet the smile on his face was bright and unguarded, almost absurdly cheerful. He had one hand raised in a playful V-sign, and the whole image made him look lively, mischievous, and far too pleased with himself.

Liora stared at it.

This had clearly been taken while he was still stuck up there. But by now he was already in Giselle’s car. How could the picture be arriving only now?

Then she understood.

It would have taken almost nothing. He only had to cut his data the instant he sent it, then reconnect later whenever he chose. That was all. A single finger. A trivial motion. It would not have stopped him from crying prettily in Giselle’s arms at the same time.

Liora kept looking at the photo, and another image flashed through her mind.

When Giselle’s car had shot past earlier, she had thought, for the briefest instant, that she saw a familiar smile.

Now that she forced herself to remember, the impression sharpened.

It seemed that Elias had been looking past Giselle, or perhaps through the narrow space over her shoulder, with tears still running down his face while he smiled at Liora.

Liora got back into her car.

She sank into the driver’s seat and tipped her head against the backrest, her breathing rougher than it should have been. Her chest rose and fell too quickly. For one suspended moment, it felt as though a revolver had been pressed against her forehead and the trigger pulled once with exquisite calm.

The only problem was that the chamber was loaded with five bullets.

She sat there very still, and for an instant she could almost smell gunpowder at the tip of her nose.

When the imagined smoke finally cleared, she remained motionless with her eyes closed, as though no one could tell whether she had survived it or not.

[Liora Voss favorability increased. Current: 43%.]

Elias had only just slipped his hand quietly out of his pants pocket when the system notice appeared.

Ten percent?

That was generous.

At least the little surprise he had prepared for Liora had not gone to waste. By now, she had probably felt very included in the performance.

Giselle glanced over from the driver’s seat.

"Stop crying."

Elias snapped back to himself and obediently lifted both hands to wipe at his face. The problem was that the tears kept coming. The more he rubbed them away, the more there seemed to be, as if his eyes had decided to disgrace him without end.

Giselle watched for a second, then opened the center console and pulled out an unopened pack of tissues.

"Use these."

Elias sneaked a look at her and gave a soft, offended little huff. "You hopeless straight girl. You don’t even know how to comfort someone. Keep acting like that and I might wipe my snot on you."

[Please think that through.]

"I’m kidding."

He had a strong feeling that if he really did it, someone as clean-freakish as Giselle would absolutely drop his favorability straight to zero.

When he felt his nose threatening to embarrass him for real, he sniffed quickly, took the tissues from her with visible reluctance, and murmured, "Thanks."

Once he had cleaned the tears from his face and managed to make himself look presentable again, he said in a softer voice, "It’s really late, and I still dragged you out for this. I’m sorry."

A faint crease touched Giselle’s brow.

She disliked apologies with no use to them. More than that, she did not understand what, exactly, he thought required apologizing for in the first place.

"There’s no need to apologize," she said. At night, her voice sounded even colder, as though the dark sharpened it. "What I want to know is why you suddenly needed to leave campus."

The fence had been high enough that she still did not understand how he had gotten himself up there alone.

Elias did not answer right away. He lowered his head a little and looked at his hands.

"It’s nothing," he said at last. "I just didn’t want to stay at school."

That was all he gave her.

It was also enough. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Giselle did not understand boys particularly well, but she understood people. After a public incident, rumors multiplied faster than rot. They spread, they stuck, and they stripped things away from a person piece by piece. Reputation. Ease. Pride. A sense of place. How much someone lost depended, in the end, on how much they could endure.

With Elias, losing everything would not have surprised her in the least.

She knew how fragile he was, or at least how fragile he looked. For someone like him to decide that scaling a fence in the middle of the night was still preferable to staying inside, the situation he had been trapped in must have been far worse than he would ever willingly describe.

Giselle said nothing more after that.

From the moment she had appeared and taken him away, she had already accepted responsibility for him. At the very least, she would keep doing so until time itself had worn this scandal thin and carried it out of everyone’s memory.

When Sloane Sinclair saw Giselle approaching with Elias following behind her, one brow lifted slightly.

She had only just come back from Lucien Hart’s birthday celebration.

At the party, while looking at Lucien, she had been bothered by a strange sense of recognition she could not place. It had hovered at the edge of her mind all evening and refused to resolve. Now, the moment she saw Elias again, understanding arrived all at once.

Although Elias was painfully ordinary to look at, there really was something about him that resembled Lucien.

The thought was so absurd that Sloane almost wondered if something was wrong with her eyes.

The two of them did not actually look alike. Not really. Their features were different, their presence even more so. Lucien felt like someone standing alone at the top of a frozen mountain, untouched by wind, snow, or the collapse of the world below. Elias, by contrast...

Sloane nearly laughed.

And there was the simple matter of beauty. Lucien was prettier than half the celebrities who made a living off their faces, the kind of person who overwhelmed others from every angle without effort. Compared with that, Elias did not even belong in the same frame.

So why, then, had she felt the resemblance so strongly?

Sloane narrowed her eyes and stared at him, as though she intended to draw the answer straight out of his skin.

Elias seemed to get frightened by the look. He hurried behind Giselle at once, lightly clutching one of her sleeves and using her as a shield while carefully avoiding Sloane’s sharp, invasive gaze. The whole act made him look timid and harmless enough to be laughable.

Giselle lifted her eyes.

"That’s enough."