Chapter 141: Afraid of the Dark

Sloane Sinclair gave a small nod, accepting the point without any real argument.

Then another thought crossed her mind, and she shook her head. "Even if he really is a two-faced little viper, he’s the highest-tier one I’ve ever seen."

Naomi Vale did not look convinced. A man was a man, and in her experience, most men who played innocent only looked clever because the women around them wanted to be fooled.

"How high-tier could he possibly be?"

Sloane answered with one sentence. "You’ve seen him before. That night, with the plane."

Naomi sat up so fast the leather cushion behind her gave a faint creak. "Holy shit."

Respect, sudden and sincere, came over her face.

Sloane did not blame her. Even now, when she thought about that night, the image still felt unreal in a way that ordinary gossip could not survive. Elias Kane, clinging to the outside of an aircraft with that pale, reckless face and that terrifyingly steady timing, had looked less like a man begging for affection and more like a professional lunatic who had audited every dramatic trope in existence and decided to weaponize the stupidest one.

"Forget whether it was sincere for a second," Sloane said. "Just look at the move itself. What two-faced little sweetheart would even think of doing that, let alone have the nerve to pull it off? If it was real, can you swear you wouldn’t be moved? And if it was fake, then you can figure out the level for yourself."

Naomi actually thought about it.

After a few seconds, her expression shifted. "That is a disgusting level of skill. Unless you had absolutely no interest in the person, there’s no way you wouldn’t feel something."

Then she started laughing, lowering her voice only because the billiards lounge they were in was too expensive for open cackling. "I’m telling you, after that night, I dreamed I was flying the plane. Giselle was out there with the little two-faced menace, both of them hanging on like they were doing some Titanic sequel. You jump, I jump, but make it airborne."

Sloane’s mouth twitched. She glanced toward Giselle Frost, who was still by the pool table with a cue in hand, silver hair falling straight over one shoulder as she lined up her final shot.

Sloane quickly waved Naomi down. "Keep your voice down. He actually has some place in Giselle’s heart."

Naomi’s laughter cut off into a whisper. "Fine. Keep going."

Sloane looked at her eager face and felt the itch of someone who had been forced to hold in too much gossip for too long. She had watched Elias work on Giselle in ways that were hard to explain to anyone who had not seen it happen. Giselle Frost was not easy to move. She was not easy to approach, easy to flatter, or easy to fool. She was the kind of woman people tried to impress from a safe distance because getting close enough to be rejected by her felt like a privilege they had not earned.

And somehow, Elias had made a crack in that ice.

Sloane had been keeping that realization locked behind her teeth because there had been no one safe enough to say it to. Now Naomi was here, curious enough to listen and reckless enough to understand.

Sloane curled her finger. "Come here."

Naomi leaned in at once.

Sloane bent closer to her ear and lowered her voice until it barely moved the air between them. "That boy also has something going on with Serena Blackwood."

Naomi sucked in a breath.

Her eyes went so wide that, for a second, Sloane thought she might choke on the information. Naomi stared at her, waited for her to take it back, then finally forced out, "Are you serious?"

"You don’t believe me?" Sloane leaned back and sighed. "I didn’t believe it at first either. Then something even more ridiculous happened, and I had no choice."

"What happened?"

"Giselle knows."

Naomi turned her head slowly, and the look on her face suggested she had just seen something crawl out of a wall.

She lifted one finger and pointed faintly toward the phone on the small table between them. "This man... did he put a curse on her?"

Sloane tipped her chin toward Giselle. "Look at her. Does she seem wrong to you?"

Naomi looked.

Giselle had just cleared the table. The last ball dropped with a crisp sound, and she straightened without any visible satisfaction. Her silver hair slid down her back like cooled metal under the lounge lights, and her fingers brushed one long strand away from her cheek with the same clean restraint she used for everything else. She looked untouched by noise, untouched by desire, and untouched by the rest of the human species.

Naomi shook her head.

"Then it must be a king-level curse," Sloane said, "because it managed to make Giselle accept this kind of situation without changing her personality."

Naomi hesitated, then spoke with the caution of someone approaching a crime scene. "So is this guy planning to eat Giselle alive?"

Sloane did not answer immediately.

The question sounded crude, but the logic behind it was not completely stupid. Elias had sent an address. It was late. The place was private. He had invited Giselle over to a residence with no one else there, at least as far as they knew. Even if nothing happened, the setup itself was not innocent, and Elias Kane had never struck Sloane as the kind of person who wasted setup.

"I don’t think he would go that far," Sloane said, though the words came out less firm than she wanted.

Naomi looked at her with an expression that said she should listen to herself.

Sloane pressed her lips together.

Naomi glanced at the phone again. "Maybe we should delete those two messages. Saving one friend from walking into a trap has to count as good karma."

Sloane stared at her as if Naomi had offered to solve a fire by drinking gasoline.

"What, and our lives don’t count?" Sloane said. "If that pretty little menace tells Giselle we deleted his messages, do you think she’ll thank us for protecting her innocence? She’ll skin us and freeze the pieces."

Naomi went quiet.

The image was obviously exaggerated. Unfortunately, it also felt possible enough that neither of them reached for the phone.

At that moment, Giselle finished clearing the table and set the cue down. She was calm from a distance, almost too calm, the kind of calm that made the room organize itself around her without anyone admitting it. A server passing near the neighboring table slowed for half a step, noticed Giselle’s expression, and decided against asking whether she wanted another drink.

Sloane gave Naomi a warning look, then picked up the phone and held it out. "Someone’s looking for you."

Giselle came over and took it.

Her face was still unreadable when her eyes dropped to the screen. Then, after one glance, the softness around her mouth disappeared, and her attention narrowed with startling precision.

Naomi slapped a hand lightly against her own forehead.

That settled it.

She might have doubted Sloane a few minutes ago, but now the evidence was standing in front of her with silver hair and a changed expression. Two messages had been enough to make Giselle Frost look serious. What kind of sorcery did that require?

Giselle did not ask either of them for an explanation. She tapped the screen and called back.

The line connected.

Sloane and Naomi stopped pretending they were not listening.

Giselle’s voice stayed cool, thin as snow falling through the dark. "There’s nothing to be afraid of."

Sloane breathed out a little. Naomi did too.

Of course. That was more like it. There was no reason for Giselle to go keep some man company at night just because he sent two messages and put on a performance. Giselle was not that easy.

Giselle listened for a while.

Then she said, "Fine."

Sloane slowly turned her head toward Naomi.

Naomi slowly turned her head toward Sloane.

For a second, neither of them spoke.

What had Elias said in that tiny gap between refusal and agreement? How did a man get from Giselle Frost’s quiet rejection to her direct consent in under a minute?

Giselle ended the call, lowered the phone, and reached for her bag.

Sloane stood at once. "Where are you going? To see Elias?"

Giselle nodded.

Sloane was already irritated on her behalf, although she could not tell whether the irritation came from protectiveness, disbelief, or the simple humiliation of watching a man outperform every woman in the room. "Why does he need you to keep him company at a place he rented?"

Giselle answered evenly. "He’s afraid of the dark."

She paused for a beat, then added, "And ghosts."

Sloane’s response died in her throat.

Naomi almost lost the fight against laughter. Her shoulders jerked once, and she had to press her lips together before she trusted herself to speak.

"Right," Naomi said, her voice strained with the effort of not laughing. "The man who climbed onto a plane is afraid of the dark and ghosts."

Giselle looked at her.

The glance was cold enough to make Naomi straighten in her seat.

Giselle did not explain. Elias was too complicated for that, and even she had taken a long time to understand the pain buried under his behavior. To outsiders, he looked like a beautiful liar with an impossible amount of nerve. To her, after everything she had seen, the ridiculous claims no longer cancelled out the rest of him. Sometimes they were part of the same wound.

Naomi understood the warning in Giselle’s eyes and stopped talking.

She watched Giselle turn and walk out of the lounge.

Sloane had been right. If someone had already decided to walk toward the abyss, there was no point standing in front of her and waving.

Following the address Elias had sent, Giselle arrived at the building not long after.

The neighborhood was good. Not merely convenient, and not the kind of passable student housing a broke college boy would choose after calculating rent against survival. The lobby was clean in that expensive, low-effort way that came from money being spent before anyone had the chance to complain. The entry system was discreet, the elevator quiet, and the lighting did not flicker or hum.

It did not feel like an Elias Kane decision.

That left only one likely answer.

Serena Blackwood.

A slight darkness touched Giselle’s clear eyes.

This was supposed to be between her and Elias. Somehow, Serena had appeared again, leaving traces in the walls before Giselle had even reached the door. The thought did not make Giselle angry in any obvious way. Her expression stayed composed, her steps stayed measured, and no one passing through the lobby would have known that something inside her had sharpened.

She went upstairs according to the floor number Elias had sent.

The hallway was quiet when she stepped out. Too quiet, almost, with carpet swallowing the sound of her shoes and the recessed lights giving the walls a clean, expensive blankness. Giselle followed the unit numbers until she reached the right door.

She lifted her hand to knock.

Then she noticed something in the corner of her vision and looked toward the stairwell.

On the landing between floors, a figure was crouched near the wall.

The sight should have been unsettling. A person tucked into the space between levels, unmoving and soundless, would have startled most people. But the figure crouching there carried no threat. His posture was too obedient, too patient, too strangely well behaved, like a child locked out after school and waiting for someone safe to come home.

"Elias?"

The word was shaped like a question, but her tone had already recognized him.

The figure stood at once.

Under the stairwell light, Elias Kane’s eyes seemed to brighten. The change was immediate and almost absurdly visible, as if someone had turned a lamp on behind them.

"Giselle," he said, and his voice carried a warmth she had not expected. "You actually came."

"Yes."

She gave the smallest nod, and before she could ask anything else, Elias moved toward her at a light run.

The motion was sharper than it should have been. Too quick, too careless for someone who had no reason to rush in a quiet hallway. Giselle’s hands lifted before she thought about it, ready to catch him if his balance failed.

But Elias stopped steadily in front of her.

Only then did she lower her hands, letting the movement disappear before it became too obvious.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked.

Elias smiled. "Waiting for you."

Giselle looked at him for a long moment.

Something about him felt different. The face was the same, still too pretty in a way that made people underestimate how damaged and shameless he could be. The green eyes were the same, bright enough to look innocent when he wanted them to and tired enough to ruin the effect when he forgot to perform. Yet the heaviness that had clung to him before seemed to have loosened. He looked lighter, almost cheerful, as if some knot inside him had finally come undone.

It did not make him easier to read.

If anything, it made him more dangerous, because Elias Kane with a burden lifted from his shoulders was still Elias Kane. He simply had more room to choose what kind of trouble to become.

He stood there in the quiet hallway, smiling at her as if being found crouched on a stairwell landing outside his own door was completely normal.

Giselle’s gaze moved from his face to the closed apartment door, then back again. "You could have waited inside."

"I could have," Elias said.

He did not elaborate.

The answer was useless, but the smile made the uselessness look deliberate.

Giselle understood, with a faint tightening in her chest that she refused to name, that he had not wanted to wait behind the door. He had wanted to see her arrive. He had wanted the first moment to happen here, in the hallway, where the door was not yet between them and the room had not yet swallowed the shape of the choice she had made.

He was afraid of the dark, he had said.

Afraid of ghosts.

And somehow he had still managed to turn waiting on a stairwell into another move.

Elias looked up at her with that newly bright expression, and his mind supplied the answer with shameless ease.

The power of love, obviously.