Chapter 2: Dinner, Then Trouble
Liora Voss's expression changed.
It was only the slightest shift, the kind most people would have missed, but Elias caught it anyway. Her pupils moved a fraction inside those beautiful fox-shaped eyes, and for the first time since he had woken up in this suite, she looked as though he had managed to say something she had not seen coming.
So he was not just a pretty face with a little nerve.
Interesting. That part, at least, she had misjudged.
[Liora Voss favorability unlocked. Current favorability: 0%.]
"If that's how you feel, then you can leave." Liora lifted a hand and gave a small dismissive motion, as though she were already done with the whole thing.
The errand her sister had handed her was a failure. She could have forced the matter if she wanted. A boy who worked at a club like this would not be difficult to pressure, and she had enough leverage to make his life uncomfortable in a dozen different ways. Still, that was not her style. Threats were crude. Effective, sometimes, but crude.
Then she realized Elias was still standing there.
He had not moved. He did not look offended. He did not look reluctant either. He simply had no intention of leaving.
Liora's brows lifted slightly. "What?"
"I'm hungry." Elias sounded so natural that the request almost came off intimate. "Can you buy me dinner?"
As far as Elias was concerned, women like this existed to be taken for as much as possible whenever the chance presented itself.
Liora almost refused on instinct. There were plenty of other women waiting for her tonight. If Serena had not insisted, she would never have wasted this much time on a young man working as a host boy in the first place.
Then the line he had spoken a moment ago drifted back through her head.
If I like the woman in front of me, I wouldn't mind letting her take my first time even if she was flat broke.
Was he serious?
Had he really taken a liking to her?
Liora found the possibility unexpectedly funny. Usually she was the one deciding who interested her. It was rare to have somebody cast his eyes her way first. Rare enough to be novel, anyway.
She rose from her seat. "Come on, then."
Elias looked up at her once she was standing and thought, not for the first time since arriving in this world, that the local gender hierarchy had gone all in on physical advantages too.
He was not short by any reasonable standard, but Liora still had a full head on him. She was all long lines and easy confidence, the kind of height that made people step aside without being asked.
The second they stepped out of the private room, the lack of soundproofing hit him like a blow. The music crashed over him at once, hard enough to rattle inside his skull. Bass rolled through the floor, people screamed over each other somewhere out on the main floor, and the whole place sounded like it was trying to burst open from too much money, too much liquor, and too many people desperate to be noticed.
Elias resisted the urge to clap his hands over his ears.
This was a public nuisance lawsuit waiting to happen.
He followed behind Liora as she cut through the club, and while he did, he let his gaze travel over her with professional sincerity.
Tall. Excellent figure. Every line of her body had that expensive, well-maintained kind of appeal. Then again, for a woman who made a habit of charming people and keeping them at a distance, that was part of the capital too.
Of course, none of these scumbag targets ever had bad bodies. The Division never made life that easy.
System Theta spoke up in his mind.
[Why did you refuse the contract?]
In the original plot, Elias had hesitated and then signed. What Elias had done just now was an immediate deviation from the expected path.
He drew his attention back from Liora's back and smiled to himself.
You're funny, he told the system. When you keep quiet until you won't interrupt me, that makes you seem well-trained. Then you open your mouth right after I told you not to chatter whenever you feel like it, and suddenly you look less impressive.
There was a brief pause before the answer came.
[My apologies. Ensuring your mission proceeds smoothly is my responsibility. I saw the plot beginning to shift and thought I should intervene.]
Elias considered that for a moment.
Fair enough. That's not disobedience. That's just you trying to do your job. He added, I'll explain in a bit.
The restaurant Liora chose matched the kind of woman who could offer five million dollars like she was handing someone a scarf she no longer wanted. It was the most expensive place in the city, or close enough that the distinction did not matter. Everyone dining there either had status, money, or the kind of connections that stood in for both. The room itself was faultless. Quiet. Low-lit. Immaculately controlled. Every piece of glass, silver, and polished wood looked as though it had been placed under direct supervision.
They were shown to a table by the window, where the whole city opened up below them in glittering bands of traffic and light.
Elias turned his head and took in the night skyline with a casual, almost absent air, as if he were not remotely impressed. He looked so at ease that it did not occur to anyone watching that this might be his first time in a place like this.
Liora noticed.
After a moment she stood. "Order whatever you want."
That finally put a spark in his eyes.
Elias opened the menu at once, his attention sharpening with real enthusiasm.
Now this was more like it.
While he looked through the options, Liora stepped into the hallway, where one of her people approached immediately and handed her a file.
She took it and flipped it open.
It was the background report on Elias Kane. It had reached her before tonight, but at the time she had thought Serena was making far too much out of a simple errand. It was a young man, not a hostile acquisition. Why waste effort building a full profile? She had skimmed it and left it at that.
Now she read properly.
Arthur Hale. Foster father. Current condition stabilized.
So even if Elias lost this job, the man in the hospital was not in immediate danger. At least not yet.
That explained his nerve.
His flirtation, then, had not only been lightheaded bravado. It was also self-protection, dressed up prettily enough to avoid looking like fear.
Liora smiled to herself and handed the file back.
He really was more interesting than she had assumed.
[Liora Voss favorability increased. Current favorability: 1%.]
The notification sounded at almost the same moment Elias finished explaining himself to System Theta.
Do you understand now?
[Yes.] The system sounded genuinely stunned. [You are not following the original plot beat for beat, but you are also not damaging the core trajectory. You are accelerating progress while keeping the structure intact.]
That's the idea.
[You are very impressive.]
Elias accepted the praise without modesty.
Obviously. I would like to retire before I rot in this job, so anything that moves things along faster without breaking the mission is just called competence.
By the time Liora returned, the first dishes had already arrived, and Elias had started eating.
She saw his canine teeth again when he cut into the steak and took a bite. They were small, white, and a little sharper than most, not ugly at all. On someone else, maybe they would have been read as cute. On him, with that face and that expression, they registered more like an artist's deliberate touch, one extra detail added because the rest had come together too cleanly.
Still, the first thought that crossed Liora's mind was simpler.
Slight dental irregularity.
"Sorry," Elias said, glancing up. "I was starving, so I didn't wait for you. You're not offended, are you?"
The sauce had stained his mouth a vivid red, bright enough against his skin to pull the eye.
Liora's gaze stopped on his lips for a beat before she sat down.
"No."
She had never cared much about table formalities, and she certainly had not expected polished manners from a boy raised in a household like his.
Then Elias kept eating, and she found herself looking at him more closely.
He was fast because he was hungry, but there was nothing clumsy about him. His movements were smooth, precise, and strangely elegant. Fork in hand, posture loose but not sloppy, he looked less like somebody who had clawed his way up from a chaotic home and more like a young man who had spent years being trained where to place his elbows and how to angle his wrist.
Liora thought back to the ease with which he had taken in the restaurant too, and for the first time she gave him her full attention instead of a passing curiosity.
Elias, of course, noticed the way she was staring.
He paused, then ran the tip of his tongue lightly over one canine before curling it just enough to sweep the remaining sauce from the corner of his mouth.
"These things caused me a lot of trouble when I was younger," he said.
Liora said nothing.
"If I wasn't careful, I'd bite my own tongue." His eyes drifted briefly, the look of someone pretending to search an old memory before returning to the present. "What about you, Ms. Voss? Ever injured yours?"
Who even got injured like that?
"No," she said. She had no desire to continue this conversation.
Elias's lips curved.
Then he blinked at her with a kind of playful innocence that should not have fit with the words coming out of his mouth and somehow did anyway.
"In that case," he asked softly, "if we kissed, do you think these would hurt you?"
Liora actually froze for a moment.
One sentence, and most of the neat little conclusions she had started drawing about him became less certain. If his earlier flirting had been self-protective theater, then what was this? A test? A joke? A deliberate seduction?
Everything about him since they left the club had made him harder to pin down. The image in the report was beginning to feel almost insulting in its shallowness.
She suddenly wanted to ask the person who put that file together for a refund.
He smiled at her from across the table, clean-faced and bright-eyed to the point of absurdity, as though a young man who looked like that should not be saying anything half so direct.
Interesting.
"Do you have a crush on me?" she asked.
"Yes." Elias nodded without hesitation. "I already told you. If I like someone, I don't care who she is. I'd still be willing to give her my body."
Complete nonsense, obviously.
As far as Elias was concerned, that offer only extended to mission targets. If Liora were feeling cooperative, she could stop pretending and take him straight to a hotel. Physical progress first, emotional capture later. There was no need to overcomplicate a winning strategy.
Liora leaned back into the sofa, arms open along the seat, a faint smile touching her mouth.
"Is that right?" she asked. "I'm flattered. Unfortunately for you, I'm not interested in men."
Elias heard the words, started answering automatically, and then stopped halfway through.
"Not interested is fine, I can still work with that. Wait." His eyes widened. "You're not interested in what?"
Liora smiled and, seeing the disbelief on his face, gave him a small confirming nod.
"You heard me correctly."
She said it with complete ease, with no embarrassment at all.
Elias, on principle, had no issue with that.
His problem was that she was one of his targets.
For a second he lost his appetite so completely that the steak in front of him became a personal betrayal. Then common sense reasserted itself. This was expensive food, and he was not about to waste it over bad luck.
He dropped all pretense of grace, attacked the rest of the meal with renewed determination, and finished everything in a rush before pushing to his feet.
His cheeks were still slightly full from the last bite when he said, "Thanks for dinner. I'm heading out."
Cleaned the plate, used the woman, and left. Beautiful.
He needed to finish the rest of the plot as soon as possible and find out whether the remaining targets were somehow even worse than this one.
Liora did not stop him.
She watched him go, watched him move through the restaurant and disappear from sight entirely, and only then stood up herself.
Out in the hallway, she took out her phone and placed a call.
The person on the other end picked up quickly. Before Liora had even explained the situation, a soft, elegant female voice asked, "He said no?"
"Mm." Liora straightened without thinking the moment she heard Serena's voice, even though Serena was nowhere near her. "Arthur Hale's condition has stabilized, and he's probably sitting on a decent amount of savings right now. He doesn't actually need money badly enough yet."
"Then make him need it," Serena said.
Her voice was gentle, warm enough to send the wrong sort of boy into cardiac arrest, but the words themselves carried no softness at all.
The line went dead.
Liora lowered the phone and gave a helpless little shrug to nobody.
How unnecessary.
Now that Serena had decided to get involved personally, the price Elias would pay was no longer going to be limited to his body.
Meanwhile, outside, Elias swallowed the last of his food and still failed to swallow his annoyance.
Did Liora have any idea how much harder that little revelation had just made his job?
No matter. He still had options. Nobody was taking his retirement away from him.
He lifted a hand and flagged down a cab.
Pull up the rest of the plot, he told System Theta as he got in and gave the driver Westbridge University. No time freeze. I'll read on the way back.
[Understood.]
The story continued.
If his arc with Serena Blackwood had been built on sex, then his arc with Giselle Frost was built on something much worse.
Heart.
She gave Elias real tenderness, the kind that reached him from every angle and never once looked fake on the surface. She was kind to him in ways Serena never had been. Careful with him. Gentle enough that even a man already burned once could look at her and think she might be different.
She was not.
From the moment she met him, Giselle had been reshaping him in quiet, careful ways. She pressed on his habits, steered his preferences, adjusted his temperament one piece at a time, all with such patient softness that the original Elias never understood he was being handled. She was building him toward the version of Lucien Hart she wanted, crafting an imitation so polished it could even surpass the original in some areas.
In other words, she was still treating him as a substitute.
The difference was that Giselle made him happy while she did it. She never hurt him outright. If the lie had lasted forever, he could have lived inside it and called it love.
As usual, the plot did not believe in letting anything pleasant survive.
Lucien returned from overseas after a car accident and came back to the country in a vegetative state. According to the story, only domestic treatment had any real chance of waking him.
Elias sat in the back seat of the cab and stared ahead.
There were so many things wrong with that sentence that he did not know where to begin.
The moment Giselle heard the news, she left Elias behind and went straight to the hospital. The real thing had returned. Whatever comfort she had found in the copy vanished at once, especially with Lucien unconscious and helpless.
So Elias got abandoned again.
This time it destroyed him far more thoroughly, because during his time with Giselle he had actually fallen in love. What he felt for Serena had been tangled up with physical dependence and pain. What he felt for Giselle cut deeper.
The result was severe depression. He could not sleep without medication. He had to visit the hospital at least once a week for psychiatric treatment.
And naturally, that was where the next disaster was waiting.
Yvonne Quinn.
Elias did not even sound surprised anymore when he asked, Let me guess. She wants Lucien too?
System Theta hesitated.
[Yes.]
Great.
Apparently the famous white-moonlight effect was operating at industrial strength. Fine. Elias had his own gravitational pull. Let them collide and see what happened.
Yvonne was one of Lucien's treating physicians, which explained how she was involved at all.
Elias leaned back in the seat.
Of course she was.
Apparently this woman handled psychiatric treatment and neurology. Why specialize in one field when the plot could just hand her everything.
As for why she targeted Elias at all, the logic stayed consistent. She could not have the original, so she settled for damaged goods.
The original Elias went to her every week believing he was receiving treatment for depression. In reality, Yvonne hypnotized him during the sessions, layering suggestion on top of suggestion until he became fixated on her against his own will. He dreamed about her at night. He craved her in the daytime. By the time the conditioning was complete, he was the one doing the seducing, and Yvonne simply let herself be persuaded.
Compared to that, Serena almost counted as honest.
Afterward Yvonne would turn herself into the victim, let Elias drown in guilt, and then comfort him just enough to pull him in again the next time.
Elias's mouth twitched.
So she's just running me through a full psychological processor, then.
[The modern term would be closer to emotional abuse,] System Theta replied.
That did not make it sound any better.