Free Web NovelChapter 192: Chapter 192: The Third Time
Chapter 192: The Third Time
Elias slipped out of the auditorium and found the restroom the old-fashioned way: by relying on his excellent memory.
More accurately, by relying on his excellent ability to smile at a student until she forgot she had been in a hurry and gave him directions.
Public restrooms had never had much room in his head. Who wandered around memorizing them for fun? If a place had no strategic value, no food, no money, no bed, and no woman worth baiting, it usually had no reason to exist in his mental map.
He followed the path the student had pointed out, crossed the side corridor beside the auditorium wing, and reached the restrooms tucked near a quiet academic hallway. The crowd noise from the gala faded behind him until the building felt almost emptied out, all carpeted silence and fluorescent hum.
He did not see Yvonne Quinn anywhere along the way.
Good.
That meant she was still inside.
Elias immediately stopped rushing.
If Yvonne was not in a hurry, why should he be?
A woman like her did not magically have free time. Countless people begged her to save their lives, and some of them were rich enough to turn medical desperation into seven-figure offers. A doctor with that kind of reputation did not randomly clear her schedule to attend a university anniversary gala, even if Westbridge was her alma mater.
Especially not when Elias had already fished her recent schedule out of Mira Perry through a few harmless questions, a few helpless smiles, and one carefully timed sigh.
Yvonne should not have been here.
So why had she come?
The answer was too obvious to be interesting.
Elias stood beneath a tree outside the restroom entrance, one shoulder against the trunk, the night air brushing through his hair. His mouth curved.
He waited.
A minute passed.
Then several more.
No one came out.
He laughed under his breath. "That is such a basic trap."
[System Theta: It is.]
System Theta sounded sincere this time.
After watching Elias lay trap after trap for women who thought they were the hunters, even System Theta could tell Yvonne’s little disappearing act was a painfully simple piece of bait. The average fish might hesitate. Elias had seen entire oceans of bait in worse stories than this.
A hook this obvious should not have caught even a minnow.
"But," Elias said, tapping his pinkie lightly against the corner of his smiling mouth, "the bait is delicious. For the bait’s sake, I’ll let myself get caught."
Then he straightened and walked directly toward the women’s restroom.
He did not slow down.
He had been standing here long enough to know no one else had entered or left. And even if someone had, so what? In this world, the worst scandal would not be that he walked into the wrong restroom. The worst scandal would be the kind of woman who made a pretty boy feel cornered enough to follow her there.
That was someone else’s problem.
The restroom was cleaner than most public facilities had any right to be. Westbridge money showed even here: pale counters, motion-sensor faucets, warm-toned lighting, mirrors without a single smear, and the faint scent of expensive disinfectant pretending to be citrus.
Yvonne stood inside.
Fully dressed. Perfectly composed. Hands clean and dry, without a trace of water on them.
Elias leaned against the entrance, smiling at her. "Sister, does using the restroom usually take you this long? Or did you never use it at all?"
His eyes drifted over her with exaggerated concern.
"Or is it a kidney problem?"
The last line lifted at the end, bright with mockery.
Yvonne slowly turned her head and looked at him.
She did not bother pretending.
Her gaze settled on him with the kind of stillness that made most people begin explaining themselves. Elias only smiled wider.
Tonight, he looked especially like a student. His jacket was clean and pale, his collar neat, his hair a little mussed from sitting under auditorium air conditioning and Giselle’s hands. The white fabric made his skin look even smoother, almost unreal beneath the restroom’s warm light.
Yvonne watched him and, against her own will, wondered if the shameless boy from that day was truly the same person standing in front of her now.
That boy had been reckless, hungry, cruelly playful, and so skilled at corrupting a room that even her self-control had started sounding like a technicality.
This one looked as if he had wandered out of a campus brochure.
No.
Not quite.
The innocence was too clean. Too well-placed.
Yvonne’s mind replayed the auditorium. Elias seated on that silver-haired girl’s lap, his cheeks flushed, his body tucked against her in a way that made him look like someone’s pretty, spoiled young husband. The silver-haired girl had been the same one from the elevator, the one standing beside him that morning.
So he had taken her too.
Or, at least, he had made her believe there was something to take.
Yvonne’s eyes lowered by a fraction.
That realization should have been nothing. Clinical data. Behavioral patterning. A useful note about a dangerously manipulative subject.
Instead, she found herself reviewing him in fragments: the way he glanced up before lying, the way he changed names when he wanted to shift power, the shape of his smile when he knew someone was already too deep to climb out cleanly.
Only then did Yvonne realize she had remembered far too much.
Her brow tightened.
The expression lasted barely a second, but Elias saw it. Of course he did.
He beamed.
"What’s wrong? Did I guess right?" he asked. "I know doctors make terrible patients, so you should get checked before it gets worse. Ask one of your colleagues. They might even give you a professional discount." freewebnσvel.cѳm
Yvonne stayed silent.
Elias did not need her to answer. Silence was also a reaction if someone knew how to read it.
He walked closer, step by step. His shoes made almost no sound against the restroom floor. Under the warm, slightly yellow light, he moved like a sleek little thief in white, coming to steal something nobody wanted to admit they still owned.
He lowered his voice.
"If you don’t have the money, that’s fine."
He paused in front of her, close enough that the air between them changed.
"I can sell myself and pay for your treatment."
Then he abruptly stepped back and burst into laughter.
It was a bright, awful laugh. Not loud enough to carry out into the hallway, but sharp enough to make the restroom feel smaller. He bent at the waist, one hand pressed to his stomach, shoulders trembling like he had told himself the funniest joke in the world.
Yvonne’s eyes followed him.
He had changed again.
In the span of seconds, the poor little thing offering to sell himself had become a cruel child laughing at the person foolish enough to feel even one pulse of desire.
She knew it was fake.
She knew the fragility was staged, the sweetness deliberate, the timing calculated.
And still, for a fraction of a second, her body had reacted.
That was the danger.
Elias finally straightened, wiping at the corner of one eye even though there was no tear there. Then his gaze traveled over her, slow and assessing.
He seemed to notice something.
His eyes curved like a fox’s.
Without another word, he crooked one finger at her, then walked past her and pushed open the first stall.
Empty.
The second.
Empty.
The third.
Empty.
He checked every stall with casual arrogance, as if this were not the women’s restroom of one of the most elite universities in the country, as if he had every right to decide whether the space was private enough for whatever game he wanted to play.
Finally, he stepped into the last stall.
Yvonne watched him.
She knew she should not follow.
The thought was clear, immediate, and entirely rational.
That was an invitation from a devil. The kind that did not ask a person to fall. It made falling feel like choosing the shape of one’s own hunger.
Elias waited inside the stall, looking back at her through the narrow opening. His smile turned sweet enough to be obscene.
"Want to buy me, sister?" he asked softly. "I’m very good."
Yvonne’s pupils tightened.
A beat passed.
Then the stall door shut with a hard, final sound.
The space was too narrow for two people. It should have been impossible to stand there without touching. Luckily, Elias was slight enough to fit where he should not have fit, and both of them were skilled enough at saving space in the worst possible ways.
Their bodies pressed close.
Too close.
Yvonne’s back blocked most of the view from the outside, if anyone had been there to see. Elias had risen onto his toes, his hands caught somewhere against her coat, his smile buried for a moment against the clean line of her jaw.
The stall held the scent of antiseptic, expensive fabric, and the faint warmth of two people breathing the same air.
Then Elias dropped back onto his heels and pulled away just enough to smile up at her.
"You haven’t paid yet."
Still provoking her.
Still pushing.
Still pretending he did not understand how close he was to the line.
Yvonne’s lips parted at last.
Her voice was low and even, cold with judgment.
"This is the third time."
Elias understood immediately.
The countdown.
Three.
Two.
And now this.
She had warned him twice already. This was the final one.
She was telling him she was not a customer buying a pretty boy’s performance. She was not one of the women he could lure in, tease, reward, and leave hungry on command.
If he stepped any further, then what came next would not be a transaction.
It would be him willingly offering himself to the devil.
The realization did not frighten him.
If anything, Elias’s smile turned brighter.
He reached for her tie, fingers sliding toward the neat knot at her throat. "Dr. Quinn, this tie really doesn’t suit you."
His gaze dipped, shameless and delighted.
"You’re too full for it."
The tie should have fallen straight. On Yvonne, it only made the line of her shirt more obvious, turning a professional detail into a guide for the eye. What should have been formal became almost insulting through sheer contradiction.
Snap.
Yvonne caught his wrist.
Elias looked up.
With her other hand, Yvonne gripped her own tie and pulled. The knot came loose in a few sharp movements. She dragged it free with an ease so clean and decisive that it looked less like undressing and more like removing an instrument from a tray.
Elias’s eyes lit up.
The excitement there was not hidden at all.
A forceful woman, a restrained threat, the sudden decision to stop pretending, all of it seemed to stir something in him. The look on his face suggested an appetite buried deep enough to be instinct, something not yet fully unearthed, something that looked dangerously close to wanting to be hurt.
Yvonne remained expressionless.
No one could have known what had just moved beneath that still face.
Not even she knew how much of Elias’s reaction was real.
Was he showing her another mask?
Had he shaped that glimmer of excitement specifically for her?
Was the boy in front of her thrilled by the danger, or thrilled because he knew she would notice it?
She could not tell.
That, perhaps, was the most infuriating part.
Yvonne had spent years reading patients, colleagues, criminals, donors, desperate families, frightened men, arrogant women, and people who thought a white coat made her kinder than she was. She knew how to separate performance from reflex. She knew how to follow the line between what someone said and what the body confessed.
Elias blurred the line on purpose.
Every time she thought she had located the truth, he offered her another version of himself, equally convincing, equally false, equally tempting.
A bright student in a white jacket.
A shameless seducer in a locked room.
A wounded boy on another woman’s lap.
A bad child begging to be corrected.
A devil laughing at the doctor who had already leaned too close.
Yvonne’s fingers tightened around the tie.
She knew only one thing with certainty.
She had already been pulled into the abyss.
And she would not turn back.
