Chapter 118: Come Back

There was no real risk in letting Giselle take the phone.

Elias knew that. He just was not about to make it easy.

"I can answer it myself," he said, shaking his head as he tried to pull the phone farther out of her reach.

He barely got the movement started before Giselle leaned in and took it from his hand in one clean motion. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Elias froze for a beat.

That had been absurdly smooth.

Was she secretly training as a purse snatcher on the side?

His face changed at once, concern rising fast and believable as he reached for the phone again. "Give it back."

Giselle caught his wrist before his fingers got anywhere near it.

Her hand closed around the narrow bones of it with effortless certainty. "I’ll handle it."

She was looking straight at him.

There was no anger in her expression, none of the cold irritation he had grown used to from her. What sat in her eyes instead was a strange, steady seriousness, the kind that made her look less like someone picking a fight and more like somewhere solid enough to stand under bad weather. It was not softness, exactly, but it carried the same effect. For one brief second, she looked like the kind of person who would block the wind without making a show of it.

That, more than anything, made it hard to keep fighting her.

Elias stopped tugging against her hold.

Only then did Giselle let go of his wrist and answer the call.

Liora’s voice came through the speaker clearly enough that Elias recognized it at once.

He snapped out of that brief moment of stillness and moved on instinct. While Giselle was deciding how she wanted to respond, he lunged and snatched the phone back.

He did not even manage to pull his hand away.

Her fingers locked around his wrist again with even less effort than before, and this time she did not merely stop him. She gave one sharp pull, dragging his arm, his shoulder, and most of the rest of him forward until half his body pitched between the front seats and nearly into her lap.

Before Elias could recover, Giselle had already taken the phone back with her other hand.

She kept him pinned in place with one hand at his wrist and held the phone to her ear with the other as if this arrangement were the most natural thing in the world.

From where he was trapped, close enough to catch the scent of her hair and the cool trace of expensive soap on her skin, Elias could just make out Liora’s voice on the other end.

"Where are you?"

The question was controlled, but only barely. The anger inside it had already climbed to the edge where it stopped sounding sharp and started sounding dangerous.

That was rare.

Liora losing her temper was not something Elias got to enjoy often, which made him suddenly very interested in listening.

Giselle’s expression did not shift much, but her voice changed at once. It lost the flatness she used with him and turned colder, cleaner, the kind of tone that treated the person on the other end as an inconvenience rather than an equal.

"He’s with me."

There was a pause.

Then Liora spoke again, quieter now, which was worse. "Do you understand what you’re doing?"

The anger from before had not vanished. It had only gone inward, pressed down so hard it came out level. That sort of restraint was never comforting. Storms were bad enough when they broke. They were worse when they had not decided where to land yet.

Giselle gave a small, humorless laugh.

"You don’t get to threaten me," she said. "If Serena wants to try, that would at least make more sense."

Her fingers remained firm around Elias’s wrist. He could feel every pulse in his own body because she was holding him tightly enough to remind him that she could keep him exactly where he was if she felt like it.

Then she finished, each word cold and simple. "Elias is with me. Nobody is taking him."

She hung up before Liora could answer.

The instant the call ended, Elias twisted free and all but fled out of the cradle of her arm. He moved back into his own seat so fast it almost looked like panic.

Giselle did not seem offended in the slightest.

If anything, she appeared to assume the obvious. He was embarrassed. That was all.

She handed the phone back to him, then turned her head and looked at him for a long moment. "Do you want to go back?"

Elias bit lightly at his lower lip before answering. "I have to."

Once, that answer would have infuriated her.

If this had happened earlier, Giselle would probably have looked at him, decided he was beyond help, and gone cold all over again. She would have thought he was doing it for the same reason he did everything else, because he was obsessed with preserving some ridiculous idea of dignity while ignoring the hand someone else had extended toward him.

But she did not look angry now.

Because at some point she had realized that Elias was not just someone willing to ruin himself for pride. He would do it for other people too. He could act slippery, shameless, manipulative, and impossible, but when the line finally appeared, he crossed it with a kind of reckless sincerity that made anger harder to hold.

A man who had once clung to a plane to stop her was not afraid of Serena.

That meant it was not Serena he feared.

It was his parents.

Giselle, when she was calm enough to think cleanly, could follow a chain of cause and effect as well as anyone. She had spent enough time turning the situation over in her head to understand why he still did not dare leave Serena’s side even after receiving help from her.

Because what she had offered him was not escape.

At best, it was relief.

It dealt with the symptoms and left the cause untouched. Serena did not even need to apply much pressure. A few careful words, aimed at the right wound, would be enough to shake him again.

Giselle did not say any of that aloud.

She simply faced forward, started the car again, and pulled back onto the road.

Elias watched her for a while, trying to read the shape of her mood and deciding there was no point. He did not need to understand exactly what she was thinking. He only needed to know whether the opening in front of him was still usable.

He put his phone on silent and waited.

The message came soon enough.

Liora: Come back.

That was all.

Two words, stripped down to command.

In the dead angle beneath the rearview mirror, where Giselle could not easily catch the expression on his face, Elias let the corner of his mouth lift. Just reading the message was enough for him to hear the tone Liora must have used in her own head while typing it.

He slid the phone back into his pocket without replying.

He had spent long enough feeding Liora that murky little game between flirtation and provocation. He had let her enjoy herself at his expense for quite a while already. It would not hurt her to panic a little.

People always did that with anything they had held too long. No matter how valuable it was at first, familiarity wore the sharpness down. They started to believe the thing would keep existing for them simply because it always had.

The quickest way to make someone value something again was to let them feel, even briefly, that they might lose it.

Liora could sit with that sensation for a while.

He had no interest in soothing her tonight. This chance was far too useful to waste. Right now, the more important thing was Giselle.

The car cut through the city at a speed that would have made most people tense. Under the wash of streetlights and traffic signals, it moved like a dark shape skimming through water, fast and silent and perfectly controlled.

Elias spent those few minutes arranging his next lines in his head until they sounded fragile enough to work.

Then he spoke, pitching his voice low and earnest. "Giselle."

"Mm?" she answered without looking back.

"I know you don’t like me. I know you don’t want to see me."

He let the words come slowly, as though he had argued with himself before saying them.

"But you can’t let me affect your life like this."

She did not interrupt, so he continued, gentling his tone further. "Skipping class, doing things this dangerous... I know you’re a genius, so maybe missing a lecture doesn’t matter for you, but that still doesn’t change the fact that you only get one life."

Giselle cut in before he could build the speech any further.

"So you can hang onto a plane, but your life comes with extras?"

Elias choked on the next sentence.

For a second he could only look at her back in offended silence.

That answer had landed a little too neatly.

He arranged his face into something wounded and quiet, but inside, he had to admit she was getting better at this. Fast, too.

Giselle glanced up at the mirror while turning the wheel, catching the expression he was making.

"I didn’t do any of this because of you," she said.

Her tone was even, almost matter-of-fact. "I skip classes because I don’t want to be there. Most of them aren’t worth my time. And skydiving is not some sudden impulse I had for your sake. I started doing that a long time ago."

She paused.

Then, a little more slowly, she added, "So no. I don’t hate you. And it’s not that I don’t want to see you."

The last sentence came out quieter than the rest.

It was not dramatically softer, and someone less attentive might have missed the shift entirely, but Elias heard it. More importantly, he did not hear any false note in it.

Giselle did not lie.

It was not that she was morally above it. She simply despised saying things that ran against her own judgment. She was too direct for politeness to win when it stood in the way of what she actually believed. Whether the whole world approved or not had never mattered much to her. Once she made up her mind, she moved in a straight line, even if that line cut right through her previous stance and made her look foolish by her own standards.

If she had changed her mind about someone, she changed it cleanly.

She was clumsy about tact, blunt about pride, and apparently willing to slap her own face in public if that was the price of acting according to her latest conclusion.

It was stupid.

It was also, unfortunately, kind of adorable.

Elias let a small smile touch his lips. "Okay," he said softly.

The hotel came into view not long after.

Even before the sign fully registered, the scale of the place made the answer obvious. The building rose in polished tiers of glass and stone, all expensive restraint and carefully staged light. The entrance was broad, the driveway immaculate, and the kind of people who came and went through its doors were exactly the kind who expected the world to move aside for them.

Five-star, minimum.

Elias knew the type at a glance.

Well, this was interesting.

If Giselle were still completely disgusted by him, she would not have brought him somewhere like this.

Of course, that did not mean he could just go along with it too eagerly. He had standards. Or rather, he had a performance of standards, which was often more useful.

He pulled his attention away from the hotel and looked at her instead. "Giselle," he asked, careful to sound confused rather than pleased, "what are we doing here?"

She did not answer. She only unbuckled her seat belt and said, "Get out."

That clarified things enough.

Elias lowered his eyes and did his part. "I can’t. I... I really have to go back."

This time Giselle actually paused and turned toward him.

Then she said, with complete seriousness, "Then walk."

Elias stared at her.

That was it?

No persuasion. No insistence. Not even a token effort.

Did this woman understand nothing? At a moment like this, a little coaxing was practically basic courtesy.

He looked at her blankly for half a second longer, then slumped back in his seat with bitter resignation.

Hopelessly straight. Absolutely hopeless.