Chapter 109: God or Devil?
Liora finally spoke.
Her tone was light, almost bored, but her eyes stayed on him. "Whose are you?"
"Yours." Elias answered without a trace of sha. "I gave you your first vampire kiss last night and you forgot already?"
The mory ca back to her at once.
It had only been a kiss. Nothing more. Still, it had sunk deeper than sothing far more explicit ever should have. The feeling of it had stayed under her skin in a way she found irritating.
A boy like him was never going to love anyone in a normal way. He was not built for that. If he showed concern, there was usually a hook hidden under it.
More likely, he was in one of his moods again and had decided even the family doctor might be worth teasing.
Liora caught the finger he had lazily lifted toward her and held it still in her hand. She lowered her gaze to him and asked, "You really have no standards at all? Even a woman that old doesn’t put you off?"
The mont she said it, Elias knew she had understood what his earlier reaction ant.
She had seen through him. He had not fallen for Serena.
As if he would.
He cared, sure, but that was not the sa thing. As far as Elias was concerned, every dangerous woman he had not successfully dealt with yet deserved the sa level of basic concern. Equal-opportunity concern. Equal-opportunity affection, if soone insisted on calling it that.
If one of them actually died before he finished what he needed to do, he would be forced into retirent in the next world.
Absolutely not.
"I’ve had enough of the younger type," he said, looking at Liora with the hint of a smile in his eyes. "Eventually you want sothing new. Isn’t that right?"
Liora took one slow step forward.
Elias stepped back without aning to.
She looked at him from above, calm and cool and entirely too sure of herself. "You really are shaless."
One of his brows rose. "I’m not shaless. Your sister is. You have no idea what those..."
He cut himself off with a startled sound.
A second later he was off the ground.
His legs kicked once on instinct before he landed in her arms. Elias turned his head, their faces suddenly close enough to share breath, and the corner of his mouth curved up. "You’ve got so nerve. Taking advantage of your brother-in-law like this?"
Liora narrowed her eyes. "Since when were you my brother-in-law?"
Elias lifted one finger between them.
He touched it, not hard, to the front of her throat.
"Since the second you started thinking I cared about your sister."
Her throat tightened.
It felt absurdly close to having the muzzle of a loaded gun pressed there. Not because he used any strength, but because he had nad the thought exactly.
He had seen through her.
Standing in front of him, she was the one who felt stripped bare.
But she had seen sothing too.
She mattered to him.
Otherwise he would not have shown that brief, genuine confusion earlier, trying to understand why she had gone suddenly cold. That reaction had not been fake. He had not liked losing ground with her.
The ga had started in his hands, but it did not look like he could keep playing it properly without her.
That ant the question was no longer whether he was steering it.
It was whether she could take the wheel from him.
Liora kept all of that to herself. What she said aloud was much harsher.
"I was worried you’d embarrass the family. If the staff saw you acting like this, what would they think? The head of Blackwood Group keeping so cheap little thing with no sense of sha."
Elias could not bring himself to care.
If another man got called a whore and a slut to his face by a woman like Liora, he would probably be halfway to tears by now. Elias felt none of that. Her words barely scratched.
He was looking at her instead, really looking, and then sothing occurred to him.
His hand moved before she could stop him.
One finger slipped past the edge of the fabric at her waist.
"Hm?" His expression changed with quick, bright interest, like he had discovered sothing funny. "You’re not wearing any?"
Liora did not deny it. "What about it?"
Only after asking did Elias rember that this world treated that sort of thing differently. For won here, wearing underwear or not wearing it carried about as much moral weight as whether he wore boxers under a pair of sweatpants. So people did because it felt better. So people did not because they were at ho and did not care.
Elias held the thought for half a second, then smiled to himself.
Good. Let her keep giving him that face. She deserved to be punished for it.
Even Liora, who usually did not care what he did with his hands, frowned at him this ti. "What are you doing?"
Elias pulled his hand back as if nothing had happened.
All pain. No useful sensation. Boring.
Liora kicked the bedroom door open and carried him inside.
The room itself was neat enough. Too neat, really, in the impersonal way expensive rooms often were. The only thing that looked out of place was the bed, and it looked very out of place. The sheets were a ss. The whole thing had the damp, wrinkled look of linen that had been washed and then left half-dry.
Exactly like Elias had said.
Liora was not surprised. That had been the point of making him move in here, hadn’t it? Serena had not done it out of generosity.
She went to throw him onto the mattress.
Elias tightened his arms around her at once. "Hey, hey, what are you doing? That bed is filthy."
Liora gave a small, incredulous laugh. "Really? Then where did you sleep last night? On the floor?"
"That’s different." He sounded almost offended that she needed it explained. "I hadn’t gotten out of bed yet, so it didn’t matter. Now I’ve been up already, so obviously it matters."
There was no logic to it. There did not need to be.
Liora ignored him, pried his arms from around her neck, and dropped him onto the bed anyway.
Elias let out a pained noise and landed face-first across the sheets.
He shoved himself up imdiately, slapped a hand against the bedding, and glared at her. "Liora."
Watching him actually lose patience was rare enough to be entertaining. There was a flicker of real amusent in her face now. "You haven’t showered either. You’re already dirty. What difference does this make?"
Elias ground his teeth.
He was not truly bothered by the ss. Not really. What irritated him was that she had ignored what he wanted and done it anyway.
So she still was not trained well enough.
Then, as quickly as the irritation ca, sothing else occurred to him.
Elias leaned back on both hands. One leg stretched out along the mattress while the other folded loosely over it. His body angled just enough to make the pose look careless, although he knew exactly what he was doing. He tipped his chin up and looked at her from under his lashes.
He bit down lightly on his lower lip.
When he smiled, there was sothing soft and bright in it that never stayed innocent for long.
"Fresh," he said.
The word landed without explanation, but Liora understood imdiately.
In that instant she had the strange, sharp feeling that the ssage he had sent her that day, the teasing little line that had seed impulsive then, had never been impulsive at all. He had planned farther ahead than most people ever noticed. What looked casual on the surface was often set out long before anyone realized they had stepped into it.
Her throat moved once.
It felt, absurdly, as if his arms were still looped around her neck.
Inside the gaze he held on her, smiling and waiting, Liora finally asked, "From last night?"
In truth, after a full night, there was nothing left. Any trace of scent would have disappeared hours ago.
But before she could think much more about it, Elias moved.
He rolled off the mattress and stood up on it in one easy motion. With the height of the bed under him, he finally looked down at her instead of up. It changed the angle between them enough to make the air feel different.
He stepped to the edge of the bed slowly.
Liora’s eyes followed him upward until she had to tilt her head back.
Then his hands ca down, gentle and sure, one on either side of her head. Elias held her face as he bent toward her. Their faces drew closer, close enough that the space between them lost any real aning.
Liora did not blink.
For one dizzy second, she thought he looked almost holy.
Not soft. Not harmless. Sothing stranger than that. The kind of beauty that made people kneel first and think later. Sothing solemn enough to pass for grace if you did not look too hard at the smile hiding underneath it.
Like a god coming down to indulge a believer.
His lips ca close to her ear.
When he spoke, the words brushed against her skin.
"So," he murmured, "do you want it now?"
Liora’s pupils contracted.
The illusion shattered at once.
There was nothing holy about him.
Whatever faint, dangerous divinity she had almost imagined was gone the mont his voice curled around the offer, tempting and amused and fully aware of what he was doing.
He was not anything clean enough to call sacred.
He was a devil, and he knew exactly how to make people lean closer anyway.
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