Chapter 95: Discipline

Elias did not hesitate.

He raised his head slowly and let Victoria Frost look her fill, offering up the full, unshielded force of his face without resistance, as though beauty itself were just another thing he knew how to place on the table when necessary.

Victoria’s gaze settled on him.

At first it almost looked like appreciation. She studied him with the calm patience of someone examining a rare object, and now and then she gave the faintest nod, as though silently confirming something she had already begun to suspect. Yet the feeling it produced in Elias was not admiration. It was assessment. Worse than that, judgment. The sensation reminded him of an executioner standing over the condemned and taking a final, meticulous look before the blade fell.

Even under that scrutiny, Elias did not flinch. His expression remained composed, his eyes lowered just enough for the sweep of his lashes to cast shadows over them, his entire bearing obedient, quiet, and almost absurdly well-behaved.

Victoria saw through it anyway.

"You seem very eager to get through this and be done with me," she said with a smile.

Elias answered softly, "I still have class, ma’am."

It was an understated reply, but the meaning was clear enough.

He wanted to leave.

"Of course you do." Victoria gave a small nod. "There are still twenty minutes. That will be enough."

So she had checked his schedule down to the minute.

It was not a difficult thing to investigate, but that was hardly the point. Bringing it up now was a reminder, and a deliberate one. He was not hidden from her. In her eyes, he was close to transparent.

There was another implication beneath the first.

Enough for what?

"Are you not going to try it on?" Victoria asked gently. "Kitten."

Elias lowered his gaze to the bag again.

Inside was a full cat costume, not only the headband. There was the outfit, the ears, even a long, narrow tail curled near the bottom like something alive.

Old woman, he thought. You really do have a taste for this.

For the first time since entering the house, a sliver of amusement touched his mouth.

"Ma’am," he said, quiet and smooth, "I may be a kitten, but..."

He lifted his eyes to hers.

"I’m not yours."

Perhaps it was because he had come in acting so mild, so soft, so easy to press. Victoria had mistaken pliancy for weakness and decided she could crush him flat if she wished.

He let a little resistance surface now.

Just a little.

"Is that so?" Victoria reached toward him.

At first it looked as though she meant to touch his face, but her hand drifted slightly and came to rest instead in his hair. Her fingers slid through the gold at his temple, testing the texture of it. "A golden shorthair," she murmured with quiet amusement. "A pretty one, too. It’s a shame your owner never trained you properly."

There was displeasure in the line now, light but unmistakable.

Elias stayed perfectly unhurried. He reached into the bag and drew out the cat ears. Compared to the cheap pair he had made Lila buy, these were exquisite. The material was softer, the workmanship cleaner, every detail expensive enough to insult the concept of novelty.

He held them out to Victoria.

"It isn’t too late to start," he said softly. "Don’t you think?"

Victoria laughed.

This time it was real. Fine lines appeared at the corners of her eyes for the first time, and the sight made her suddenly look not older exactly, but more alive. For all her polish, that was the first genuine smile Elias had seen from her.

"No," she said. "It isn’t."

She took the headband from his hand.

Elias, understanding at once, inclined his head and lengthened his neck for her. The pale line of his nape lay exposed beneath the lifted strands of his hair, vulnerable in a way that was almost intimate. It was the same instinctive gesture with which a cat might bare its stomach to a hand it acknowledged as stronger. Softness offered up at the point where it could be hurt most easily.

With his head bowed, Elias could not see what Victoria was doing. He only felt the light brush of her fingers and the faint scratch of movement against his scalp before the ears settled into place.

This was his concession.

He was choosing submission as a bargain. He would let her put the ears on him if it meant she let the rest go. If this satisfied her enough that she did not make him change into the full outfit, the trade was worth it.

It was not shame that motivated him.

He had already done far worse than wear cat ears.

The real problem was the risk. A full presentation like that might stir appetite where he did not want it stirred. If Victoria’s desire entered the equation, he would have a new crisis to manage, one far more dangerous than Giselle’s feelings. A woman like Victoria did not steal prettily. She claimed. And if she claimed him, he would become a plaything long before he became useful.

Fortunately, she chose to relent.

When Elias lifted his head again, he met her gaze and saw his own reflection in her pupils, a blond boy now wearing cat ears at her hand.

Golden shorthair.

It did fit embarrassingly well.

He was still absorbing that when Victoria’s palm came to rest against the back of his neck.

The touch was cool at first, then warm, and unmistakably indulgent. She stroked there slowly, not with desire but with the deliberate approval one might show an obedient pet after a successful correction.

"See?" she said. "A little discipline, and you’re much better behaved already."

Elias said nothing.

When someone was petting a cat, silence usually served better than speech.

After a while, Victoria let her hand fall.

She looked at him with that same unreadable depth and said, "You’re very clever."

There was no falsehood in it.

"Truly very clever."

The remark was closer to admiration than anything else she had offered him so far. Victoria Frost was not generous with praise, and Elias knew it. She had likely never met anyone quite like him before. Even here, even under her control, he had managed to stay light on his feet, adjusting his posture and resistance with exquisite timing, like a butterfly dancing over the edge of a blade without quite cutting itself.

"I thought that fool had already ruined herself," Victoria went on, "but her taste, at least, turns out not to be entirely worthless."

Giselle Frost, the campus genius recognized by everyone around her, reduced by her own mother to that.

Elias, inwardly, almost laughed. No one could speak that way with such ease except a parent.

Victoria’s voice softened again. "If circumstances were different, I would rather you were my child. Then I would not have to worry so much. The future of Frost Group would not concern me in the same way."

She studied him for a beat.

"Fortunately, you are not my child. You are a boy, and she is a girl."

A ripple passed through Elias’s eyes.

Victoria said, with perfect naturalness, "Marry her. If you stay by her side, I can entrust Frost Group to her without hesitation."

That, at least, broke through his composure enough to show in his face. His eyes widened slightly. The elegant fox-like shape of them sharpened with real surprise, sudden and impossible to fake.

Victoria laughed again at the sight, then lifted a hand and tapped him lightly on the head. The gesture was gentle, almost affectionate.

"There’s no need to keep playing house with the two Blackwood girls," she said. "Whatever you think you want, the Frost family can give you the same."

The woman saying this was talking about the head of Blackwood Group as though she were still some child at play.

And yet Elias did not inwardly dismiss it. Victoria Frost had earned the right to say a sentence like that. Whether or not a direct corporate war would actually go as smoothly as her tone implied was another matter. Serena was no amateur either. Elias trusted his disasters. Every one of them came with advantages ordinary people did not.

He still did not speak. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

It was not time yet.

Sure enough, Victoria continued.

"But not now."

Her smile deepened, grown-woman allure in full bloom, sensual without ever turning vulgar. "As she is now, my daughter isn’t worthy of you. Don’t you agree?"

Obviously, Elias thought.

With Giselle’s present level of emotional intelligence, if he ever approached her without system objectives restraining him, he could ruin her a hundred different ways before she even realized she had entered the game.

Still, he held his tongue. Victoria had more to say.

"So I need your help," she said at last. "You’ll have to force a little growth out of her. Then perhaps she’ll become someone fit to stand beside you."

She tilted her head slightly.

"Putting some effort into your future wife hardly seems unreasonable, does it?"

We are not that close, Elias thought dryly.

"And besides..." Victoria lowered her voice, intimacy threading into it like silk. "For someone like you, this should be a simple matter. Shouldn’t it?"

Elias let his eyes flicker, just once. "I don’t know what you mean."

Victoria sighed.

It was a quiet, indulgent sound, the sort made over a pet choosing stubbornness after it had already learned better. Her hand returned to the back of his neck, fingers lightly pinching the skin there, handling him exactly as if he truly were a cat she owned.

"So naughty again," she murmured.

Then her hand slid upward along the side of his neck, over his jaw, to his cheek. Her fingers curved there and tipped his face up, forcing his eyes to meet hers directly.

Her voice remained warm.

"Don’t be difficult. Give her a lesson. Make her grow into a woman."

She paused, and the corners of her lips curved.

"Of course, if you prefer to keep playing those childish games with the two Blackwood girls, I won’t stop you."

Her thumb brushed lightly along his cheekbone.

"All I require is that my self-important daughter learns one thing."

Her eyes did not soften.

"That everything she prides herself on amounts to nothing."