[Cover Character: Giselle Frost.]

Elias Kane was supposed to be done.

He had survived too many beautiful disasters, too many obsessive women, and too many games where love was just another name for ownership. He knew how to play innocent. He knew how to play desirable. He knew how to turn sweetness into a weapon and vulnerability into a trap.

All he wanted now was a clean exit.

Then he woke up in a near-future world built on female power, old money, public elegance, and private cruelty.

Here, powerful women do not need to shout to be terrifying. They sign contracts. They buy silence. They smile for cameras, donate to hospitals, fund universities, and ruin lives with perfect manners.

And Elias has landed directly in their line of sight.

A cold CEO who mistakes possession for care.

A woman who smiles softly even when she is about to ruin someone.

A campus goddess wrapped in wealth, beauty, coldness, and quiet cruelty.

A doctor who can open the mind and leave damage no one else can see.

Every one of them wears perfection beautifully. Every one of them knows how to lie. Every one of them is capable of ruining him without ever raising her voice.

This time, Elias is not walking into a messy romance plot he can outplay with patience and a better performance.

He is walking straight into a inescapable cage built from contracts, surveillance, coercion, and desire sharp enough to cut. One wrong step, and he will lose more than his freedom. He will become something to keep, control, and ruin.

Unfortunately for them, Elias has never been as helpless as he looks.

He understands women like this. He understands hunger dressed up as tenderness, cruelty dressed up as protection, and obsession dressed up as love.

All he wants is to survive, cash out, and disappear.

Unfortunately, the women circling him have started wanting something else.

By now, Elias understands the rule better than anyone.

The cruelest women do not corner you.

They draw you in.

They make you step closer on your own.

Then they close their hands and call it fate.

[Extra Tags: No Yuri, No NTR, Reverse Rape, Cunning Main Character, Matriarchal World, Absued Main Character, Cold Main Character, Physically Weak Main character, Manuplative Main Character, Cunning Main character, etc.]

The moment Liora lowered her head, System Theta reported it.


[System Theta: Host, Liora Voss found you.]


"Then she found me." Elias let out a soft laugh. "This is more exciting for her than seeing it straight on."


System Theta wanted to say that was not the point.


The point was whether Liora would tell Serena.


Then it processed the situation properly and went quiet.


Of course Liora would not tell Serena. She had once been the "second pair of legs" hiding in a room like this, caught in a scene she should never have watched. How could she betray Elias now without handing him the exact same knife to use on her later?


Good thing it had not asked that out loud.


Elias lifted his eyes again and looked at Yvonne with the same look of surrender, then lowered them almost at once. The movement was obedient enough to seem trained.


"You didn't sell me out, Yvonne," he murmured. "How am I supposed to repay my benefactor?"


Chapter 196 - Chapter 196: Dirty