Chapter 137: Ednar
"Hellen," said a handsome young man with blonde hair and grey eyes as he walked in, concern evident in his expression.
"...are you okay?" He intruded her personal space without care, completely ignoring the pink-haired young man that stood with his head hung low, as if Riley were nothing more than a piece of furniture in the room.
"I... I’m fine," she said as Ednar held her, giving a smile that would steal the heart of any man who had no defense against her natural charm. Quite deftly she cast a side glance at Riley, expecting to see some flicker of jealousy, tightened jaw, clenched fists, just something. But... he didn’t seem to care. In fact, it was as though he wasn’t even affected in the slightest by her being this close to Ednar. His posture remained unchanged, his breathing steady, his eyes focused somewhere beyond them both as if witnessing something far more interesting than her intimate moment with another man.
Well, it was unreasonable to consider him being affected by it in the first place—after all, he’d made his feelings perfectly clear—however this still irritated the young lady given she was used to being longed for, desired, coveted like a precious gem that men would kill to possess.
She had always had this natural ability to draw attention to herself, and it was something she noticed from quite a tender age. Even as a child, conversations would halt when she entered a room, heads would turn, and adults would stumble over their words in her presence. It was due to this very ability that she, with time, cultivated this... skill to read people. It was more intuitive than learned, an instinct honed through countless interactions where she’d learned to decipher the subtle tells of human desire.
The ability to tell when someone was looking at her with one of three emotions: Lust, Love—the soft, worshipful look that placed her on an impossible pedestal; and Hate—the bitter, resentful stare of those who despised her for having what they could never obtain.
But all she sensed from this young man, from the very day the met, was one thing and one thing alone: Possessiveness.
Yet it wasn’t the possessiveness she expected. No, this was something else entirely—cold and strangely impersonal.
He didn’t look at her as a ’woman,’ and that was one of the things that unnerved her most. She had spent three whole days in that hotel with him before the guards had found them, and all through that time, all through these days since, the young man had barely looked at her. Not in the way she was used to, anyway. His eyes would pass over her as if she were a tool, a means to an end rather than an end in herself.