[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.]

Liora kept one hand over her chest, feeling the strange pressure there refuse to fade.


That sort of shared ache was supposed to belong to sisters with the same blood, wasn't it?


She and Serena were sisters by family, by history, by household, by the Blackwood name. They had been raised under the same roof and sharpened by many of the same rooms. Blood, however, had never been part of the arrangement.


So if this feeling was not sisterhood, then…


Liora's expression stiffened for a fraction of a second.


Before she could follow the thought further, a staff member hurried back, face strained with panic. "Ms. Voss, Ms. Blackwood, she…"


Liora's eyes narrowed. "What happened to her?"


The staffer swallowed. "She took him to the storage room."


Then she turned at once. "Security room. Now."


Chapter 220 - Chapter 220: Deception