The Seductive Pretty Boy of the Matriarchal World-Chapter 87: Beyond Saving

Chapter 87: Beyond Saving

Elias lowered his gaze to his clothes and clicked his tongue.

To make the fall look graceful after Giselle threw him, he had very deliberately picked the best possible angle. There was an art to collapsing beautifully. The price, unfortunately, was obvious now. Muddy water had splashed up half his body, and the knees of his pants were streaked with grime. Dark smears of wet soil clung to the fabric everywhere. He looked like he had crawled out of a drainage ditch.

A shower, then.

He decided to head back to the dorm, wash off, and change into something clean before the filth dried into the seams.

On the way there, he did not forget to stay in character. His phone stayed in his hand the entire time. He kept calling Giselle, kept sending message after message, relentless and shameless, all of them vanishing into silence exactly the way he expected they would.

No answer.

No reply.

Nothing.

Still, he persisted.

He kept going until the thirty-seventh call, when the ringing finally cut off and the mechanical voice informed him the phone had been turned off.

Only then did Elias stop.

He looked at the screen and frowned with mild annoyance. "Honestly. You could’ve powered it down sooner."

He was the one harassing her, yet the complaint sounded as if he were the injured party. His delicate brows drew together as he stared at the dead call screen. "Do you know how much airtime that wasted?"

Then he remembered the transfer from Liora and immediately recovered.

"Whatever," he muttered. "She sent me five hundred. I’ll count it as reimbursement."

His mood improved enough for him to type out another message, this time to Yvonne Quinn’s assistant through the private number he’d been given before. Once that was done, he slipped the phone away at last and exhaled.

"Time to shower."

Back at the dorm, Elias finished in five minutes.

He came out rubbing his wet hair dry with a towel, completely naked and unbothered by it. No robe. No towel around his waist. Nothing at all between his skin and the air. Water beads slid down the smooth lines of his chest and stomach, traced the dip of his waist, then fell one by one to the floor.

There was no one else in the room just then, so modesty was pointless.

He picked up his phone, glanced at the screen, and arched a brow.

"No reply?"

Was it because he had washed too quickly, or because Yvonne had specifically told her assistant not to answer him?

Elias considered both possibilities for a second, then came to a conclusion with offended certainty.

"They’re all dogs."

At Longhaven Hospital, Yvonne Quinn’s assistant was sorting through messages.

This part of the job was unavoidable. Most doctors received the usual flood of appointment requests, a smaller number of grateful thank-yous, and the occasional piece of abuse from someone angry enough to type things they would never dare say in person. Yvonne’s inbox worked differently.

A small fraction of it involved actual appointments.

The rest was garbage.

Invitations to dinner. Invitations to drinks. Invitations to private rooms, private villas, private jets. Men and women alike asking to meet her, see her, take her out, keep her, worship her. Some messages were dressed up in polished language. Some barely bothered. A few were so obscene they came with photos no assistant should ever have to open during work hours.

When Elias first met Yvonne and thought that someone like her was fundamentally unsuited to medicine, his judgment had been harsher than polite society allowed, but not exactly wrong.

That was not even the strangest part.

Ordinarily, a doctor in her position would have been safer with a male assistant handling this kind of trash. Men, faced with the endless filth other men sent, could at least be expected to examine it thoroughly and keep the worst of it from slipping through. Yvonne could not hire one. Put a man too close to her for too long and there was a very real chance he would stop acting like an employee and start imagining he deserved a taste.

Which meant the role had to go to another woman.

Even then, the job carried risks of its own.

Mira Perry had learned that the hard way.

At last she finished screening the latest batch and rose from her seat to report. Yvonne sat behind her desk the entire time without interrupting once. She only listened. Silent. Still. Beautiful in the unnerving way a marble statue was beautiful, perfectly composed and nearly inhuman. Every so often she gave a slight nod to show she had heard. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Mira went through the routine updates one by one until she reached a familiar problem.

"Ms.Harlan wants another appointment next week..."

Yvonne’s lips parted at last. "Haven’t you explained it to her already?"

Mira shivered.

There it was again.

That voice.

Soft enough to make a person’s bones go loose, beautiful enough to sound indecent. It was almost unfair that a question so mild could land like a hand brushing the inside of your ear.

Thank God I have a boyfriend, Mira thought wildly. Another few months of this and I really might start having problems.

She forced herself back on track and answered, "I’ve told her more than once, but she still insists."

Yvonne lowered her gaze. Her long lashes cast shadows over her eyes.

Ms. Harlan was one of the city’s better-known tycoons, terrifyingly rich and dying anyway. She had paid a fortune in the hope that Yvonne might save her. Yvonne could not. The most she could do was slow the decline, stretch the line between life and death a little farther than nature intended. She had already done everything possible. It still was not enough.

So the woman came every week.

Every single week, she returned only to ask whether there were any signs of improvement. Whether the disease had turned. Whether her money had finally purchased a miracle.

No matter how gently the truth was delivered, it remained what it was.

Cruel.

And yet Ms. Harlan kept coming back. Yvonne could see the mechanism clearly enough. The appointments, the fees, the escalating costs were not really treatment anymore. They were consolation purchased in installments. As long as the money kept moving, she could pretend hope still existed.

That was what it meant to be truly terminal. Ill in body. Ill in mind. Hollowing out from every direction at once.

Days spent with people like that had a way of corroding the observer too.

Even Yvonne sometimes felt herself becoming something equally diseased.

"Schedule her," she said at last. "Next week."

"Understood."

Mira did not trouble herself with the larger philosophy of death and desperation. Her job was to manage logistics, not contemplate the architecture of despair.

She was just about to move on when the tablet in her hand gave a quiet ping.

She blinked.

That sound meant the message had come through her personal contact, not the hospital channels. Her family knew better than to bother her during work hours. Her friends did too. Which meant...

She looked down at the notification.

"Elias Kane?"

The name meant nothing to her. She frowned, mildly puzzled, and ignored it on instinct, already planning to deal with it after work.

Yvonne’s gaze lifted. "What did he say?"

Mira froze.

So this was someone Dr. Quinn actually knew?

Then why had she given him the assistant’s private number instead of letting him contact her directly?

Confused, Mira opened the message and read it aloud.

Elias: Dr. Quinn, are you free this afternoon... would you like to get dinner with me?

Halfway through, realization hit.

That format was unmistakable.

Not work. Not gratitude. Not a follow-up. It was a date invitation, dressed up just politely enough to pretend otherwise.

Mira’s head snapped up. She stared at Yvonne in disbelief.

Dr. Quinn... dating?

The idea felt absurd on its face. Yvonne sat there as expressionless as a carved saint, remote and immaculate, a woman who seemed less likely to fall in love than to dissect the concept and file it under pathology.

Instinctively, Mira shook her head. No. Impossible.

"Time and place," Yvonne said.

Mira inhaled so sharply it almost hurt.

What the hell?

Dr. Quinn had actually agreed?

Elias Kane.

Yvonne rested her elbows lightly on the desk and let her beautifully shaped chin settle against her fingers. His name moved through her mind once, then again, and with it came the image of his face.

That bright smile.

Warm. Lively. Sunny.

The complete opposite of the people who surrounded her every day, all those wealthy bodies lingering at the edge of death, desperate to buy another month, another week, another hour. Elias felt pure and innocent in a way that almost offended the rest of the world. Merely imagining him in front of her made the air seem less stale.

As if staying near that kind of boy could heal something.

[Yvonne Quinn favorability increased. Current favorability: 5%.]

Mira was just opening her mouth to relay the details when Yvonne said, with the same calm tone as before, "Never mind."

Mira blinked again. "Doctor?"

A second ago she was willing. Now she was refusing. The reversal made no sense at all.

But asking questions was not part of the job.

Yvonne never explained more than she wanted to, and Mira had long since learned that pressing her was pointless.

She simply shifted topics instead. "That’s everything. All the messages have been handled."

Yvonne nodded once. Her voice turned gentle again, though the distance in it never changed. "Thank you. You’ve worked hard."

"It was nothing."

Mira shivered for a second time, hugged the tablet to her chest, and hurried out before her imagination could get any worse. She needed to go find her very cute boyfriend as soon as possible and forcibly correct whatever suspicious bend her sexual orientation was developing in this office.

The door closed softly behind her.

Click.

Silence returned.

Yvonne’s eyes lingered on the shut door for only a moment before she withdrew into herself again, and at once the image in her head changed.

The smiling, healthy boy disappeared.

In his place came another vision entirely.

Elias lying beneath surgical light. Elias opened from throat to abdomen by her own hands. Elias slowly losing the heat and brightness that made him seem so offensively alive, his body changing piece by piece until he resembled the others, the dying ones, the rotting ones, the people who came to her already half gone.

Yvonne’s throat moved.

A low breath escaped her, almost a sigh.

"There’s no cure for this."

She was already sunk too deep in the mire for anyone to drag her back out.

The only thing she could still do was stay away from the people foolish enough to step close to the edge.

Otherwise he would follow her down.

And once he did, he would rot there forever.