The Seductive Pretty Boy of the Matriarchal World-Chapter 86: Easy to Rattle

Chapter 86: Easy to Rattle

Giselle froze as if lightning had struck straight through her.

In that same instant, her mind lurched violently awake and began producing thought after thought with merciless speed.

She remembered the phone call from a little over an hour ago. Elias had made only one brief sound then, a broken breath, nothing more. But the human brain was monstrous that way. Even without ever having experienced anything like it herself, she could already imagine with sickening clarity what might have happened between him and Serena in that car.

And now that same filthy man was clinging to her.

His arms were wrapped around her waist. His tears had soaked through the thin layer of fabric and touched her skin.

Giselle had assumed revulsion would come first. She should have felt nauseated. She should have wanted to shove him away and scrub herself clean until her skin burned.

Instead, her mind remained strangely sharp.

This shirt was ruined. The moment she got back, it was going into the trash.

Along with this entire moment, if such a thing were possible.

Elias was still apologizing. Again and again, in that soft, miserable voice, each repetition plucked at the last frayed thread of restraint she had left.

Then, at some point, she seemed to hear a small sound inside herself.

A quiet snap.

The string broke.

Her eyes changed at once. The last of her patience vanished, replaced by something violent and cold. She spun around, seized Elias by the arm, and for one strange, irrelevant second registered the feel of him.

His skin was smooth.

Almost absurdly smooth, like milk.

She ignored it.

With a sharp movement, she hurled him away from her.

Elias hit the ground hard with a muffled grunt. The folded black fabric in his hand flew loose at the same time, lifting briefly into the damp air with an almost delicate flutter. It spun once like a dark butterfly, then dropped with cruel precision at Giselle’s feet.

For a moment, the entire grove went still.

The world seemed to stop with it.

Giselle lowered her head and stared at the black scrap of cloth on the path beside her shoe. Then, slowly, the look in her eyes moved from it to Elias’s face.

He was lying in the dirt, stunned.

His glasses had flown off when he fell and now rested several feet away in the grass, leaving his face completely exposed. Without them, with moisture still clinging to his lashes and pooling at the rims of his eyes, he looked heartbreakingly young. Soft. Pure. Almost fragile enough to bruise under a stare.

Pure?

He had just gotten out of another woman’s car.

No one knew what he had been doing in there, except that whatever it was had ended with him stepping out without even wearing his underwear.

Giselle could not have named what she was feeling if someone had forced her to try. The fury had burned through so fast it had become something else. What remained was not anger but a bizarre, bloodless calm, as though her emotions had been flash-frozen into something more dangerous.

If she had to give it a shape, it would be simple enough.

She wanted this shameless man gone from in front of her.

In every sense the word could hold.

Elias stared back at her from the ground. In her sea-blue eyes, he could see wave after wave of violence rising beneath the surface, cold and merciless and edged with something far worse than disgust.

It looked like she wanted to kill him.

He dragged himself back a small distance on instinct, the movement awkward against the wet ground. For the first time, a real trace of fear showed in his eyes.

That look did more for Giselle than anything else had.

It cooled her, if only slightly. It reminded her that if she stayed here any longer, she might truly do something she could not take back, something so extreme it would break even her own control.

So she made the only choice left.

She turned and left without another word.

Her body moved with startling speed, clean and powerful, like a hunting cat disappearing into the trees. In seconds she was gone, silver vanishing into the dim green of the grove as if the forest had swallowed her whole.

She left like someone who would never come back.

Elias smiled.

So what if Giselle never wanted to see him again? That was her decision to make, but whether she could keep it was another matter entirely. He had more than enough ways to drag her back.

He pushed himself up slowly from the damp ground. At some point his tears had already stopped. They always did. There was something almost mechanical about it, as though he had a switch somewhere inside himself that could turn grief off the second it stopped being useful.

He brushed the dirt off his clothes with lazy care, then walked several steps over, bent down, and retrieved his glasses. Once they were back on his face, he looked almost like himself again. Composed. Ordinary. Harmless in that practiced way he wore so well.

Then he stooped once more and picked up the black scrap of fabric from the path.

He clicked his tongue and gave a small, amused shake of his head.

"Poor little virgin," he murmured, smiling to himself. "She really can’t take a tease."

It was just a pair of briefs. That was all. Yet it had scared the life out of her.

Honestly.

System Theta had nothing to say for a moment.

[...]

[Scanning host mental state.]

This time it did not even dare try stepping into Giselle’s position to model human emotion. One wrong calculation and it felt as though its processing core might short out on the spot.

Elias, by contrast, looked bored. "Forget it," he said lightly. "I’ll go tease the other puppy instead."

He took out his phone and sent Liora a message.

Elias: Did you enjoy the show?

The sentence carried two meanings at once. One was the performance he had just put on with Serena, the whole ugly little melodrama of degradation and submission. The other, naturally, was the much longer private show in the car, the one that had lasted nearly an hour and would have been paywalled if the world were fair.

That thought made him pause.

Then he smacked his own forehead with mild annoyance.

"Right," he muttered. "I should’ve charged for that."

He was just about to demand money from Liora outright when her reply came through.

Liora: It was very watchable.

Elias’s eyes brightened at once.

Watchable?

Then pay up.

Elias: Liora, if you liked it that much... how about leaving a tip?

Back in her office, Liora Voss stared at the message for a moment longer than necessary.

It took her a second to understand what, exactly, he meant by a tip.

Then she did.

He had turned that entire spectacle into a private premium broadcast in his own head, and now he was trying to charge admission for it.

Sometimes Liora honestly wondered whether Elias Kane was even capable of belonging to this world in any normal sense. No ordinary man could descend this quickly. If most people fell, they did it in stages. They hesitated. They resisted. They clung to appearances until the last possible second.

Elias did not fall like that.

He dropped like a rocket fired in reverse, vanishing into the abyss so fast it almost felt graceful.

And yet...

Liora smiled faintly to herself and accepted the game.

A transfer notification popped up on Elias’s screen.

His eyes lit up. He tapped it immediately.

Then his expression flattened.

"Only five hundred?"

The smile vanished from his face on the spot. He ended the exchange without hesitation, every trace of flirtation cut off at once.

Cheapskate woman.

He almost texted that she was lucky he had not revoked her only chance to sleep with him. Of course, he only thought it. There was no point saying something like that outright, especially when the truth of it mattered more than the joke.

That step was non-negotiable.

It was not because he had some collector’s obsession with firsts. It was much simpler than that. No matter how much someone loved him, if that line had never been crossed, their favorability would stall at ninety-nine percent forever.

Desire and love were never cleanly separable.

Take desire out of the equation and the feeling turned into something else. Affection. Loyalty. Family. Friendship. Devotion, maybe. But not love. Not the kind the system recognized. Not the kind that completed the score.

On the other end, Liora looked at her phone for a while after he went silent.

A little smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

So that had been the point.

He had been trying to fleece her.

Little liar.

And yet one question lingered.

Elias rarely spent money. In fact, he barely seemed to spend any at all. If another man had received the millions of dollars Serena handed over, he would have burned through it by now on cars, watches, hotels, jewelry, status toys, anything expensive enough to prove he had climbed out of whatever gutter he started in.

Elias had done none of that.

He held onto money with peculiar stubbornness, chased after it when it amused him, and then left it untouched once he had it.

So why was he this attached to it?

"What exactly are you hiding?" Liora murmured.

Her thumb brushed lightly over his profile picture on the screen. It was just a selfie. Plain to the point of being dull. The face in it looked like an ordinary college boy, forgettable and flat and easy to overlook.

Nothing about that picture matched the boy she knew now.

That Elias was all edges and traps and buried things, every answer leading to another question.

The more she dug, the more curious she became.

And the more curious she became, the deeper she wanted to go.

He was the sort of abyss that invited a person to lean in until leaning became falling.

Liora admitted it to herself with quiet ease.

She had already started to fall.

But what of it?

She was far from the only one.

She lifted her gaze from the phone and looked across the office at Serena, who was sitting still while an assistant treated the injury on her face.

Serena noticed at once.

Her voice turned cold. "I’m telling you now, Liora, if you so much as laugh, I will throw you and the couch out of my office together."

Liora smiled.

Ever since Serena got tangled up with Elias, she had become less frightening by degrees. It was inevitable. A beast with a weakness was still dangerous, but not in quite the same absolute way. The illusion of invincibility cracked the moment something could reach its throat.

"Don’t worry," Liora said softly. "Focus on getting that cleaned up. I won’t laugh."

She paused, the smile at her lips gentler than the amusement in her eyes.

"There’s nothing embarrassing about getting scratched by a leopard."