Chapter 158 --158
There was a reason Elara had never been close to a man in this world—and it wasn’t innocence.
In her first life, back when she was a CEO in a cutthroat industry, she had learned early that being a young woman at the top made her a target. Not just professionally. Not just in boardrooms or negotiation tables where men underestimated her numbers and overestimated their own. No—the danger went further than that. It followed her into social spaces, into the dimly lit corners of business dinners where champagne flutes were passed a little too eagerly, into galas where someone always seemed to find his way close enough to refill her glass before she’d noticed it was empty. Men who decided that a brilliant, emotionless woman would make easy prey once her guard came down. That underneath all that precision and cold control, she must be soft. Waiting to be unlocked by the right opportunity.
They were wrong about that. Profoundly, catastrophically wrong.
Because Elara had always had two sides.
The first was the one the world knew: calm, controlled, surgical. The woman who could dissect a hostile takeover at three in the morning without her voice rising by a single register. Who could sit through a negotiation designed to humiliate her and come out the other side having taken everything. Who felt nothing—or at least showed nothing, which in her industry amounted to the same thing. A glacier given a title and an office on the forty-second floor.
But the second side—the one that lived beneath the surface, the one that only surfaced when exhaustion or poison or something chemical shattered the careful architecture she maintained around herself—was something else entirely. Something that didn’t obey the same rules. Something wild and unpredictable and dangerously, recklessly intense, like a pressure system that had been building for years finally making landfall.
The few men who had tried to take advantage in those unguarded moments—who saw a drugged drink or a stumbling step as an invitation—had learned the truth very quickly. Drunk Elara didn’t become soft. She didn’t become pliant or quiet or easy to manage. She became a storm in a human shape. Demanding. Consuming. She took control so completely, pushed so relentlessly, that the men who’d thought they were predators found themselves unable to keep up—overwhelmed, outpaced, undone by exactly the thing they thought they’d engineered.
None of them ever came back for seconds.
She’d never fully decided whether that was the point.
And now, in this body, in this strange and beautiful and brutal world, with poison burning slow rivers through her veins and five loyal beast knights arranged before her like a constellation of kneeling stars—