Chapter 124: The First Slip

Elias sucked in a sharp breath and lifted one hand to his cheek.

That had hit his tooth.

The brief, clean burst of pain told him it was not his imagination. Apparently biting a lollipop in front of a woman as a psychological weapon carried occupational hazards. He held still for a second, letting the ache settle, then pulled the candy from his mouth.

Without any shame at all, he held it out to Liora.

"Here."

Liora lowered her eyes to the lollipop.

The candy had lost its neat roundness. Its surface shone wetly beneath the library lights, slick with the trace of someone else’s mouth. Thin threads of gloss clung to the sugar, catching in the faint ridges where Elias’s teeth had cracked it. By any normal standard, this was the sort of thing only someone with real intimacy would tolerate. Someone with no claim on him should have felt revulsion first.

Liora did not.

She looked at the candy and felt no disgust at all.

Worse than that, something inside her stirred.

Her hand moved before she allowed it to. The motion was small, controlled, nearly invisible to anyone watching from the next table, but she noticed it the moment it happened.

She stopped.

Elias had just used her apology to make a game out of her. She had come to retrieve him, and in less than five minutes he had made her bend down in public, marked her mouth with cheap sugar, and told her with that bright, hateful smile that he still refused to forgive her.

How could she trust him again so quickly?

She was about to withdraw her hand as if she had never reached for it when Elias slid the plastic stick into her fingers anyway.

Then he pointed at her.

"Don’t throw it away."

The words sounded like a threat.

They also sounded, inconveniently, like permission.

He had given her an excuse she could not refuse. If she put the lollipop in her mouth now, it would not be because she wanted to. It would be because Elias had ordered her not to waste it. The distinction was thin enough to be useless, but Liora accepted it anyway.

Under his shameless, watchful stare, she brought the candy to her lips.

The taste was not unpleasant. There was no sourness from him, no trace of anything that should have made her recoil. Only artificial strawberry, bright and cheap, sharp at the edges and sweet after that. The sugar touched her tongue, and a faint chill moved through her chest.

Elias’s eyes curved again.

Liora’s throat worked once.

He had seen through her.

She kept her expression level. "Can we go back now?"

Elias gave a small nod, as if he had won whatever he came here to win. "Let’s go."

He stood. The distance between them closed for a second, and Liora saw his mouth clearly.

His lips were glossy from the candy, pinker than usual and wet enough to look as if he had put something on them. He had not. It was only sugar. Strawberry sugar, if the color was anything to trust.

Which meant the taste would probably be the same.

They left the library together, passing through the turnstiles and into the open campus air. Westbridge’s stone paths were bright under the afternoon sun, and students moved around them with the loose confidence of people who knew they were protected by money, status, or someone else’s name. Elias walked beside her for half a dozen steps before he tipped his face up with a smile.

"Try it and find out."

Liora’s heart gave a hard, traitorous beat.

She removed the lollipop from her mouth and said calmly, "Try what?"

"Who knows?" Elias clasped his hands behind his back and drifted ahead of her with an almost childish bounce to his step. His laugh reached her over one shoulder, lazy and delighted. "What were you thinking about?"

Liora watched him walk ahead.

The corner of her mouth lifted by a fraction.

So he really had seen through her.

Had she been staring at his lips for that long?

By the time they reached the car, Liora had put her face back in order.

The driver opened the door with the practiced discretion of someone who had learned not to look too closely at the people who paid his salary. Elias slid into the back seat first, then turned his head toward Liora as she settled beside him.

He studied her for a beat. "Aren’t you going to coax me a little more?"

Liora opened her wallet without a word.

She counted out ten bills and placed them in his hand.

The gesture was clean, direct, and so deadpan that it almost became an answer by itself. Her face said, Is this enough?

Elias blinked at the money.

"Not enough."

Liora took out her phone.

A moment later, Elias’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the notification and saw the transfer.

Ten thousand dollars.

He stared at the number and thought, with a calm that did not flatter him, that he was getting greedier by the day. Once upon a time, ten thousand dollars landing in his account for doing almost nothing would have made him feel something stronger than mild satisfaction.

That did not stop him from accepting it immediately.

He turned his face toward Liora and blew her an exaggerated kiss through the air.

"Mua."

The delivery was so lazy it bordered on insulting.

Liora laughed.

That was exactly the kind of attitude that made her feel at ease.

There were arrangements built on appetite alone. Clean, temporary things, because everyone involved understood the rules. A person wanted, took, paid, and left. No one dragged love into it. No one pretended it had to become something with a future and a name and a set of obligations that wrapped around the throat.

Even those arrangements carried risk. People could slip. Desire could mutate into attachment. A body could become habit, then hunger, then weakness.

But that would not happen with Elias.

Anyone else might fall.

Elias would not.

As long as she controlled herself, they could keep going like this forever. An arrangement without sincerity. A game without a final act.

The car carried them back to the Blackwood residence.

When they arrived, Liora did not follow him upstairs. She returned to her own room instead, leaving Elias in the care of the house staff and the polished corridors of Serena’s territory.

Elias did not mind.

Liora had been more cautious in front of the staff since Serena’s suspicion. That was sensible. He appreciated sensible women. They were still a disaster, obviously, but at least they occasionally used their brains while ruining his life.

He did not go to Serena at once.

Instead, he turned to a nearby staff member and asked, "Do we have masks in the house?"

The staff member hesitated only because the question was unexpected. "Yes, sir. Did you need one?"

"Give me a pack." Elias held out his hand with a straight face. "I’m afraid Serena might infect me."

The staff member stared at him.

For a moment, she looked like she was reconsidering every clause of her employment.

Still, this was the Blackwood residence. The staff did not survive here by commenting on the personal habits of the family’s favorite disaster. She disappeared and returned with a sealed pack of disposable masks.

Elias put one on before entering Serena’s room.

The moment he stepped inside, he caught the flash of disbelief on Serena’s face.

It lasted less than a second.

Then her expression darkened.

Elias ignored it. "You should be grateful I came back to take care of you at all. What else do you want? If you’re unhappy, what are you going to do about it?"

He stopped himself before finishing the sentence.

The unfinished implication sat in the room anyway.

Serena’s fever-bright eyes narrowed.

For the next few days, Elias took care of her with the mask on.

He brought her water. He handed over medicine. He checked the humidifier, adjusted the curtains, and performed every basic sickroom task with an air of martyrdom so exaggerated that even the house staff learned to leave quickly after dropping things off. Every so often, he argued with Serena as if provoking a bedridden woman was part of the prescription.

It worked better than it should have.

Serena would glare, snap back, cough, sweat through the anger, and end up sleeping harder afterward. The private doctor would never have prescribed emotional irritation as a fever treatment, but Elias’s method seemed to drag the illness out of her by force. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

By the third day, Serena’s fever had already broken.

The doctor confirmed it that morning, though her temper made a stronger case than any thermometer could have. When she finally recovered enough to move properly, she got out of bed and returned the favor.

Thoroughly.

By the end of it, Serena was drenched in sweat and looked clearer than she had in days, not cured by revenge exactly, but certainly restored by it. The last of the feverish fog had burned away, leaving her eyes bright and her breathing steady. If illness had made her weaker, revenge put her back together.

Elias, meanwhile, lay flat on the bed like someone who had been pulled from deep water.

His chest rose and fell hard. His limbs had gone loose against the sheets, and the mask was still on his face.

The mask had somehow ended up back over his mouth.

Serena had put it there with a cold smile, and Elias, being Elias, had let her. Worse, he had laughed against it, as if the whole thing were another insult he had decided to enjoy.

Since he liked wearing one so much, Serena had made sure he kept it on.

The act had been petty. It had also been satisfying enough that Serena did not pretend otherwise.

Elias stayed like that for a long while before he came back to himself. When he finally moved, he lifted one weak hand and pulled the mask down.

His lips were wet and bright, marked by the damp heat trapped beneath the mask. The material itself had gone soft beyond saving.

Serena stood beside the bed and looked down at him with a cold smile.

"So you like wearing masks?"

Elias let out a faint laugh. His voice had gone hoarse, wrecked at the edges from use. "It’s because I was wearing one."

The relationship between them had already reached this point. He no longer needed to swallow every sound and pretend he was unaffected. He had been loud enough to make Serena’s fingers tighten more than once, and the memory of it still hung in the room.

Serena’s expression paused.

His words were a provocation. The mask had made it harder for him to keep himself composed, which was why she had managed to reduce him to this state. That was what he was implying, and he knew exactly where to place the needle.

Serena’s smile lifted.

Then she got back on the bed.

Three hours later, Elias was finally satisfied.

He had been starved for days. Serena had fed him properly at last.

Her favorability had climbed to 55% over those three days. A ten-percent rise, given the circumstances, was almost easy.

Elias was exhausted enough that even satisfaction felt heavy. He closed his eyes and fell asleep almost at once.

The room went dark around them.

Beside him, Serena turned her head and watched him in the low light.

Her gaze settled on his mouth.

That was the one place she had never kissed.

Not because there was anything ugly about it. The opposite was true. On his face, his mouth was the most tempting part, especially in bed, when every time it opened, the sound that came out could strip the room down to instinct.

Serena watched him sleep.

[Serena Blackwood favorability increased. Current: 60%.]