The Seductive Pretty Boy of the Matriarchal World-Chapter 82: Shattered Glass

Chapter 82: Shattered Glass

The darkened screen hit Elias like a physical blow.

He clutched the phone in both hands and folded forward slowly, spine curving until his forehead nearly touched the leather seat. By the time his knees hit the floorboard he was curled in on himself, shoulders hunched, the device pressed tight to his chest as if it might shatter if he let go. The slap he had delivered still echoed in his palm, but the real weight was lower, somewhere behind his ribs, pressing every breath into something thin and strained.

Serena Blackwood’s cheek burned where his hand had connected. The heat pulsed through half her face, but anger wasn’t the first thing that surfaced. She heard him first.

The whisper was faint, almost lost beneath the low hum of the engine and the rain tapping the windows, yet in the sealed quiet of the back seat it cut straight through.

"Giselle... Giselle..." 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Serena’s pupils shrank to needle points.

For one suspended second it felt as though he had struck her again, only this time the blow landed somewhere deeper, somewhere she had not known was exposed. The suspicion bloomed fast and ugly.

Did he like Giselle Frost?

...

Back at the restaurant Sloane Sinclair had been pacing in front of the tall glass for so long she was starting to irritate herself. Every few steps she glanced outside. Every few steps after that she checked her watch. The drizzle refused to stop, laying a steady silver veil across the city lights and turning the sidewalk into a glistening black mirror.

She had waited long enough.

Where the hell was that boy?

Was he really stubborn enough to walk the entire way?

Sloane exhaled a sharp, humorless laugh. "Cute. He’s got spine after all."

If Elias wanted to sulk and refuse her ride, that was his choice. She had offered. He had turned it down. Whatever happened on the road would be on him.

That was what she kept telling herself.

Five minutes later, with the rain still falling and no sign of him returning, she shoved her chair back so hard the legs screeched across the marble.

"Jesus Christ."

It wasn’t that she cared. Not really. It was that if anything actually happened to him, Giselle would skin her alive.

Still muttering, Sloane headed for the door. At that exact moment her phone rang. She answered without thinking, and Giselle’s voice came through cool and level.

"Did you drive him back?"

Sloane’s heart gave a guilty lurch.

For one ugly heartbeat she felt exactly like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Luckily she was already behind the wheel. He couldn’t have gone far on foot, not in this weather. She could still bluff.

"Obviously," she said, forcing smoothness into her tone. "That’s what I’m doing right now."

"Put him on the phone."

Sloane’s voice jumped. "Excuse me? You trust me that little?"

Giselle stayed perfectly calm.

"Put him on the phone," she repeated.

Sloane deflated instantly. "Okay, fine." She cleared her throat. "I didn’t actually drive him. But he refused. He was being weird about it."

That much was true.

"It’s raining, Sloane." A new chill edged Giselle’s words. "And he doesn’t have an umbrella."

"All right, all right." Sloane pulled out into traffic. "I’m already moving. I’ll find him."

As it turned out, Elias had not gone far at all. Barely five hundred yards down the slick street.

Sloane let out a relieved breath. "I see him, he’s right—"

The sentence died.

A sleek black luxury sedan glided to the curb beside him, rain beading on its polished surface like liquid obsidian. The rear door opened. An arm reached out, seized him, and yanked him inside with the kind of ruthless efficiency that looked less like a pickup and more like an abduction.

Sloane’s breath locked in her throat.

This was bad. Really bad.

Her first instinct was to memorize the plate, but recognition hit before she could finish the thought. She knew that car.

"Giselle?" she said quickly. "You still there?"

"Yes."

Sloane’s panic shifted into confusion. "How does your little guy know Liora Voss?"

A beat of silence.

"Who?"

"Liora Voss," Sloane repeated. "Blackwood family’s second daughter. The one who prefers women. Don’t tell me you seriously don’t know who... Hello? Giselle? Hello?"

The line went dead.

Sloane stared at her phone, utterly baffled.

She hadn’t even finished the sentence.

Giselle ended the call and immediately dialed another number.

It was the only entry in her recent log with no name attached. Its blankness made it stand out like a deliberate warning among all the labeled contacts.

The phone rang.

And rang.

Between the second ring and the fourth, something hot and violent surged through her chest, spreading like fire across dry grass. Her hands tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked. The feeling was sickeningly familiar—the same suffocating dread that had crawled through her after that dream, the one she still couldn’t shake no matter how many times she told herself it was only a dream. Heavy. Black. Pressing the air out of her lungs until breathing felt like a privilege she no longer deserved.

She jerked her gaze to the rearview mirror.

Her own eyes stared back, faint red threads veining the whites. What unsettled her wasn’t the strain. It was the look beneath it—frayed, feverish, disturbingly close to the edge.

Giselle shut her eyes at once.

She hated that reflection.

It reminded her too much of her father in those final days, the man who had stepped off a building and left behind a silence no one in the family ever named directly.

Calm down.

She repeated it silently, once, twice.

Calm down.

Liora had taken Elias. Serena wouldn’t have gone herself. That gave her time. She could still reach him before Serena got what she wanted. She had promised him.

That promise still mattered.

Giselle opened her eyes. The blue had steadied.

The call connected.

Silence answered.

Her heart clenched so sharply it felt like a hand closing around it.

She didn’t know how she knew. There was no proof, no reason beyond raw instinct. But the instant that heavy, deliberate quiet filled the line, she understood exactly who was on the other end.

She was too late.

Neither of them spoke. The hush stretched between them like an extension of the standoff outside the Pinnacle Club the night before—still about Elias, only now he was physically caught in the middle, trapped in the back seat of that luxury car.

Then a sound spilled through the speaker.

A low, trembling moan.

It curved through the line soft and unmistakable, carrying the wet echo of skin and helpless need. Giselle recognized Elias’s voice at once.

Her heartbeat stumbled.

It felt as if someone had shoved her from behind and sent her tumbling straight back into that nightmare, the one where everything bright twisted grotesque and every silence hid something rotten underneath.

Her hand moved before thought could stop it.

The phone slammed into the windshield with a crack that sounded almost explosive inside the quiet cabin. The impact shattered both the screen and the glass in front of it, spiderweb fractures racing outward before the whole pane burst apart. Shards sprayed across the dashboard and into the front seat.

Giselle stared at the wreckage.

A fragment had sliced her forehead. Blood slid warm and slow down her temple, slipped into the corner of one eye, and stained the blue of her gaze a violent red.

Until that moment she had thought the dream was the nightmare.

Now the real one had begun.

And while her car sat in ruins, the inside of the other one was no better.

Serena had finally caught up to what had happened.

How long had it been since anyone dared lay a hand on her like that?

This wasn’t some symbolic slap she could laugh off later. It had been real, hard, and humiliating. Worse, it had come from Elias—the boy she had been riding deep and possessive only minutes earlier, the one she barely considered a proper replacement for what she truly wanted, yet who had somehow found the nerve to strike her while still buried inside her.

Every careful agreement, every polite clause they had ever drawn between them tore apart inside her head in a single instant.

She seized him by the shoulders and flipped him backward onto the seat.

The movement was brutal. One second he was hunched forward clutching the phone, the next Serena was over him, her full weight pinning him down as if she meant to crush every last trace of defiance out of his body. His jeans were still shoved down around his thighs, shirt rucked up and damp with sweat from the way she had used him earlier. His skin was flushed, marked where her hands had gripped him, the evidence of what they had been doing still slick between them.

Her fingers locked around his jaw and squeezed until the bone creaked under the pressure, nails digging in hard enough to leave crescents.

It felt as though she might really break him.

Then the word she had once hissed in private fury slid out again, low and venomous.

"Slut."

Who had given him the courage to do that?

What exactly had convinced Elias he could hit her and walk away?

Elias looked up into the fire blazing in her eyes, his own face tight with pain as her grip bit deeper. His body was still sensitive, still half-hard from the interrupted encounter, every small shift of her weight dragging another unwilling spark through him.

So this had genuinely pushed her over the edge.

For once even System Theta cut in, flat and unusually urgent.

[Host, your survival index is dropping rapidly.]

It wasn’t the physical blow. It was the cold calculation: if Serena kept spiraling like this, the road ahead ended in ruin.

Elias stayed cold.

Not panicking was half the job in moments like this.

And then, to System Theta’s clear alarm, he drove his knee straight up into Serena’s lower abdomen with everything he had left.