Chapter 207: The Ultimatum
For a rare moment, Victoria Frost lost focus.
Elias was smiling at her.
That smile should have looked sweet on an eighteen-year-old boy. Pretty, harmless, perhaps a little spoiled by knowing too many powerful women found him beautiful.
Instead, it carried the kind of nerve she rarely saw in people twice his age.
He did not look like a student caught in a room with someone far above him. He did not look like prey trying to talk his way out of a hunter's hand. The courage alone would have been enough to set him apart from almost every boy his age.
Worse, it was not only courage.
He had leverage.
Victoria had given part of it to him herself, yes, but a gifted knife was still a knife if the person holding it knew where to place the blade.
In that brief silence, Victoria almost saw a shadow of herself in him.
No one stayed eighteen forever. Someone was always eighteen.
What made her pause was not that thought.
It was Giselle.
