Chapter 433 --432
Chapter 433: Chapter-432
He couldn’t. Hearing her use such simple, childlike words to describe the agonizing, bloody mess inside his chest was a completely different kind of torture. It proved that she wasn’t completely blind; she could see his pain, but she was still entirely incapable of understanding ’why’ he was bleeding.Down at the guard line, Ken’s dark eyes narrowed to slits as he watched the two of them from below. He couldn’t hear their whispers over the ballroom music, but he could see the heavy, unblinking focus Elara was directing toward the northern prince. Mahir’s ears gave a sharp twitch, his long dark tail lashing once against the stone floor in a low, territorial rumble. They didn’t like the way she was looking at him. They didn’t like that she was changing her own rules just to reach him.
Julian swallowed a mouthful of the bitter wine, forcing his throat to open. He set the glass down and turned to her, his ice-blue eyes flashing with a sudden, dangerous heat that cut straight through his nonchalant facade.
"If I am crying, Elara, then just leave me to drown," Julian whispered fiercely, his voice cracking just a fraction beneath the weight of his hidden agony. "Go back to your machine. Go back to your knights. You don’t know how to fix this anyway."
Elara stared at him. For the first time in either of her lives, she found herself completely trapped in a conceptual deadlock. His words were simple—stark, sharp, and biting—but they lacked any logical structure she could trace. *Go back to your machine. Go back to your knights.*
Her mind automatically tried to pull up the palace defense metrics, the tactical deployment of the first and second guard cohorts, and the administrative schedules for Ken and Mahir. But as she looked at Julian, she forced those heavy, documentary thoughts down. She stayed within the simple parameters he had demanded.
"The knights are at their posts," Elara said, her voice dropping into a quiet, completely unpolished monotone that felt strange even to her own ears. "They do their jobs. I do my job. You are here. I do not understand why you are talking about them."
Julian let out a short, ragged breath that was supposed to be a mocking laugh, but it sounded far too broken to pass as nonchalant. He leaned his elbow on the armrest, pressing his knuckles against his mouth to hide the sudden, violent tremor of his lips. He looked away from her, his ice-blue eyes fixing blindly on the swirling colors of the dancing nobles below.
"Of course you don’t," he murmured, his voice thick, laced with a quiet, devastating irony. "You don’t understand. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? You can sit there and look right through me, and you don’t even know that you’re holding the knife."
"There is no knife," Elara replied instantly, her vacant glass-bead eyes blinking once. "You are safe here. Clause Four guarantees your physical protection within the capital borders. No one is hurting you."
"Elara, stop." Julian closed his eyes, his silver hair falling slightly forward, shadowing his face from the bright candlelight of the chandeliers. "Just... stop. I asked for simple words, not a lecture on your safety clauses. If you keep talking to me like this, I am going to lose my mind right here on this dais."