Chapter 97: Cold War

Liora watched him with that loose, careless expression on his face and pressed her lips together.

She had gotten flustered.

It irritated her that he could still do that.

She had never met a man this sharp before. Even Serena, whom she had always considered frighteningly gifted, did not seem to rival Elias where emotional maneuvering was concerned. The evidence was sitting right in front of her. Serena had sunk faster than Liora had, and she still had not fully realized it.

[Liora Voss favorability increased. Current favorability: 60%.]

[Liora Voss favorability decreased. Current favorability: 59%.]

Elias turned and stared at her.

Really?

She was tugging him around with a single percentage point now?

It was the first time he had ever seen favorability drop under normal circumstances. In the past, decreases only happened when he had deliberately pushed a heroine into blackening. Once they were soothed again, the score usually came roaring back with frightening force.

But this one percent of Liora’s was different.

She had reached the line and then pulled herself back on purpose.

Elias clicked his tongue inwardly.

Go on, then. Keep controlling yourself. One day you’ll be the one wagging your ass for your sister.

By the time the Blackwood residence came into view, his annoyance had been partially replaced by interest.

The last time he came here, it had been dark. All he had really been able to tell was that the estate was enormous and impossibly quiet. In daylight, the full shape of it finally revealed itself. It matched the Frost estate in scale, but where that one leaned older and more stately, this place embraced modern luxury without restraint. Glass, steel, polished stone, clean lines, open space. It suited Elias better at once.

He had seen enough traditional palaces in other worlds to last a lifetime. Some of them had floated.

This was more his style.

He was still taking in the architecture when Serena stepped into view.

Only then did he look away from the house.

She did not speak.

She did not even give him a proper look.

Fine. If she wanted silence, he could silence harder than she could.

Liora took in the scene, let out a quiet laugh, and walked off without explaining where she was going.

Elias smiled inwardly.

The resident observer had finally caught up to herself. She knew enough to be jealous now. That was progress. Good progress.

Jealous or not, though, she could sit with it. He would gladly help Serena and himself make a full plate of it and set it down in front of her.

A male servant pulled out a chair for Elias. He turned his head and thanked him softly before sitting down.

Throughout all of it, he did not look at Serena once.

Serena said nothing either. She only lifted one hand and gave a slight signal.

Then the food began to appear.

One dish after another.

The table filled so quickly it bordered on excessive, all of it expensive, carefully plated, and fragrant enough to stir saliva in Elias’s mouth before he had even made up his mind whether to stay angry. He had originally intended to maintain a perfectly blank funeral expression from start to finish, but that plan ran into a problem.

The problem was that everything smelled too good.

His eyes brightened despite himself.

Serena noticed at once.

Watching him swallow discreetly and stare at the spread with badly disguised interest improved her mood for no logical reason she cared to examine. At least she had found one thing about him with her own eyes and not through someone else’s interference. Elias loved good food. Not casually, either. His body responded to it before his pride could get involved.

Elias finally reached for his utensils.

Serena did not.

She only sat there, watching him with a deep, unbroken gaze.

She had seen him often enough now that the glasses no longer interrupted the picture in her mind. Even with them on, she could reconstruct his features perfectly. There was no difficulty in it anymore. Every line of his face had settled somewhere permanent in her thoughts.

Elias could feel her looking at him.

That was her business.

He was eating.

He had no time for her.

The meal itself was devastatingly good. By the time he finished, his stomach had rounded slightly beneath his shirt, and satisfaction had softened the line of his shoulders.

Serena had clearly figured out his taste by now. Every dish placed in front of him happened to be something he liked.

Elias flicked a glance at her at last.

Well done.

As a reward, he would continue the cold war.

The sweet course came last.

It was some kind of molecular gastronomy nonsense, elaborate and showy enough to make most people suspicious on sight. It had been shaped to look like a perfectly fresh strawberry, complete with leaf and shine, but every part of it had been made from something else, all edible, all engineered.

Elias stared at it for a second, unconvinced.

Then he bit into one of the leaves.

Mint exploded across his tongue, bright and cold and almost shockingly fresh, and a low sound escaped him before he could stop it.

Damn.

Serena really was shameless.

She had pulled out something like this and expected him not to be affected?

Still, good as it was, it remained a single strawberry. It only took him two or three bites to finish it. The loss hit immediately. A flicker of regret crossed his face before he could smooth it away.

Serena noticed that too.

"Are there any left?" she asked.

The chef, a foreigner whose English still carried the shape of another language, looked uncertain. "That one was prepared for you, ma’am..."

"Give it to him."

A second strawberry was placed in front of Elias.

He looked up.

Serena was no longer watching him. She had lowered her head and was staring at the phone in her hand as though something there required her full concentration.

What was this supposed to be?

Some arrogant straight woman who wanted to coax her sulking boyfriend back into a good mood but still could not lower herself enough to say so aloud?

Elias almost laughed.

Then, very deliberately, he said, "Take it away."

His face was blank.

His voice was cold.

The step she had built for him to climb back down was kicked away on sight.

Sorry. He was a high-maintenance little menace, and he had no intention of pretending otherwise.

Serena’s eyes turned sharp at once. "You really are determined to spit on kindness every chance you get."

Elias said nothing.

Not even a scoff.

Arguing had its uses. Most fights burned hot and then resolved once enough had been thrown into the open. Cold wars were different. Silence let resentment sit there and harden. The issue remained untouched, and because it remained untouched, it grew. Eventually it swelled until the whole thing burst apart.

As far as Elias was concerned, it suited whatever this was between him and Serena perfectly.

"If he won’t eat it, clear it," Serena said, her voice turning colder by the word. "Consider the whole table no better than scraps chewed over by a dog."

That did it.

Elias shot to his feet, grabbed the strawberry, and hurled it straight at her face.

She had not been expecting that.

The dessert burst against her before she could dodge, syrup and cream smearing across her cheek and jaw and leaving her momentarily, gloriously disheveled.

"You’re the dog!" Elias snapped. "You and your whole family!"

For a second, Serena looked as though she might finally explode.

Then, strangely, her expression eased instead.

Not softened, exactly, but shifted.

"Get out," she said to the room.

The servants and the chef fled at once, moving with the speed of people who knew better than to be caught in someone else’s storm.

When the dining room had emptied and only the two of them remained, Serena fixed her gaze on him and said in a voice low enough to cut, "Come here."

She sounded like she was about to hit him.

Elias widened his eyes. "No."

"Come here."

"No."

Now she truly began to lose her temper. Serena stood and moved around the table to grab him.

Elias moved too.

A huge dining table made an excellent battlefield if you were quicker than the person chasing you, and he was much quicker. He slipped around it lightly while Serena followed, the two of them circling polished wood and abandoned plates in an absurd little war of pursuit.

He ran.

She chased.

And unlike in stories where panic made people clumsy, Elias had no trouble at all.

The table was simply too large. If Serena wanted to catch him directly, she would have to climb onto it or cut across in some equally inelegant way, and that would have been too humiliating even now.

Worse, every time she looked at him with those angry cheeks and that furious glare, she had the ridiculous impression that he was not really resisting but sulking. As if this whole performance were some distorted form of pouting, a way of demanding that she appease him.

The thought was insane.

Nothing in his expression resembled softness. He looked genuinely enraged.

Serena decided she had to be losing her mind.

Even so, her anger remained trapped inside a strange boundary. She was furious, yes, but not in the way she had expected. She could not quite reach the level of pure rage where she honestly wanted to hurt him. Something about his behavior kept knocking the edge off it before it could sharpen fully.

So she stopped and let her voice drop instead.

"Come here," she said. "This is your last warning."

Then she began to count.

"Three."

Elias stood on the opposite side of the table, still glaring.

"Two."

Serena’s hand tightened against the tabletop. If he refused again, she was very close to overturning the entire thing.

Before she could, Elias started walking toward her.

The movement was stiff and oddly deliberate, like a puppet ordered forward by invisible strings, every step just slightly too controlled to feel natural.

He came to a stop in front of her.

Then, with perfect blankness, he said, "One."