Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 428: Chapter-427

"Your Highness, stop! You cannot enter the Regent’s private quarters without an audience!" a guard’s panicked voice shouted from the outer room, followed by the heavy thud of spears crossing in front of the door to stop him from actually breaking the lock.

"Move aside!" Julian’s frantic baritone voice echoed through the thick wood. "I don’t care about your protocols right now! Tell regent it’s an emergency regarding the northern trade routes!"

Elara opened her vacant, glass-bead eyes. Her mind instantly calculated the noise and the interruption. "Ken, Mahir. Stand down," she ordered, her voice a flat, freezing monotone that brooked no argument.

She slid out of the heavy blankets, her movements precise and unhurried. She quickly pulled on her black linen shirt, buttoning it up to the throat, and slid back into her structured charcoal uniform trousers. She didn’t bother to pin her hair back perfectly, letting it fall slightly loose around her shoulders.

Ken and Mahir stepped back into the shadows of the inner room, their bare chests heaving with suppressed fury, their eyes fixed on the doorway like predators waiting to tear an intruder apart.

Elara walked out into the office, smoothed down her vest, and unlocked the heavy iron bolt. She opened the door, looking flatly at the sweating palace guards and the breathless, silver-haired prince standing between them.

"Let him in," Elara commanded the guards. "Return to your posts."

The guards instantly bowed and scrambled away. Julian didn’t even wait for her to invite him further; he practically pushed past her into the office, his chest heaving as if he had run all the way from the eastern wing. He looked completely disheveled, his usual nonchalant attitude entirely gone.

"Your highness, you need to look at this right now—" Julian started, turning around to face her with a thick roll of parchment in his hand.

But the words died instantly in his throat.

Julian stood entirely rooted to the floor, the roll of parchment nearly slipping from his numb fingers. The nonchalant prince who always had a witty comeback or a lazy smirk was completely gone. He was frozen, his ice-blue eyes wide with a shock so deep it felt like a bucket of northern ice water had been dumped straight over his head.

Elara hadn’t just dressed quickly; she had left the buttons of her black linen shirt completely undone around her midsection, exposing the smooth skin of her waist and stomach. And there, pressed deeply into her skin, were massive, dark finger marks from a heavy, territorial grip. Right below her collarbone, a fresh, sharp love bite stood out, bright and completely unbothered by any attempt to hide it.

But what made Julian’s heart completely stop wasn’t just the marks. It was the fact that Ken and Mahir weren’t even trying to hide.

They stood just inside the open doorway of the inner room, bathing in the warm lamplight. Ken was leaning casually against the doorframe, his bare chest slick, his long hair falling wildly over his shoulders. His shirt was completely unbuttoned, hanging loosely off his muscular frame, and his dark eyes were fixed on Julian with a lazy, mocking smirk that practically dared the prince to say something. Next to him, Mahir stood like a massive, half-bare mountain of muscle. His dark trousers hung low on his hips, his chest chest was bare, and his beast-kin ears were upright and alert. His long tail gave a slow, deliberate *thump* against the floorboards, his golden eyes wide with a smug, territorial satisfaction.

They had deliberately let their shirts stay open. They wanted him to see. They wanted the foreign prince to know exactly who owned the private spaces of the Empress Regent.

Julian had been born and raised in royalty. He knew about political marriages, he knew about secret mistresses, and he knew the scandalous bedtime secrets of half the high courts in the North. He wasn’t innocent. But he had never, in his wildest dreams, expected to see *this*. He had thought Elara was a bloodless, freezing machine who spent her nights calculating tax brackets and staring at walls. He had thought she was entirely detached from the world of flesh and desire.

To see her standing there, completely unbothered, while two of the most lethal military commanders in the empire practically marked her as their own in her private quarters, completely shattered his brain. His gaze darted from the fierce bite mark on her neck, to Ken’s mocking smile, to Mahir’s lashing tail, and finally back to Elara’s face.

Elara, completely oblivious to his internal meltdown, didn’t even try to pull her shirt closed. Her heart rate remained perfectly steady, and her vacant, glass-bead eyes reflected his panicked expression without a single hint of embarrassment.

She looked at him, her voice dropping into her usual, completely flat and calm monotone. "What is it? What’s wrong?"

Julian tried to speak, but his throat felt like it was full of dry sand. He stared at her open collar, then at the two massive, half-naked commanders standing right behind her like a pair of smug palace demons.

"I—" Julian started, his voice cracking slightly. He quickly cleared his throat, desperately trying to pull his royal dignity back together. He forced his eyes away from her neck and looked up at the ceiling, his face burning a bright, furious red. "The... the northern trade routes. The winter storm has blocked the third pass. The supply wagons are stranded."

"The third pass has a secondary valley route designed precisely for heavy snow clearance," Elara replied instantly, her voice completely flat and level, as if she hadn’t just walked out of a bed full of her own military instructors. "The deployment metrics for the snow plows were finalized on Tuesday. The wagons will be delayed by a maximum of four hours. It is not an emergency."

Julian blinked, his brain struggling to process her cold, administrative logic while his eyes were still burning from what he had just witnessed. He looked back down at her face, his ice-blue eyes wide and full of absolute disbelief.

"That’s... that’s why I ran across the palace?" he muttered, looking entirely lost.

"Yes," Elara said, her vacant gaze tracking his breathing pattern. "Your panic introduces an unnecessary variable into the midnight log. If you had checked the secondary clauses in your own registry, you would have saved twelve percent of your physical energy."

Behind her, Ken let out a low, deeply amused chuckle. He crossed his bare, muscular arms over his chest, his unbuttoned shirt shifting slightly as he leaned his head back against the doorframe, thoroughly enjoying the prince’s complete humiliation. Mahir didn’t laugh, but his long dark tail gave another slow, heavy *thump* against the floor, his golden eyes locked onto Julian with a smug, quiet warning. *See?* his posture seemed to say. *You are just a contract. We are the reality.*

Julian looked from Elara’s dead, unbothered eyes to the two men, and a sudden, sharp realization hit him. The nonchalant, witty prince who always had a comeback was completely trapped. He couldn’t call her a hypocrite, because she had explicitly written into Clause Twelve that *he* wasn’t allowed in her bed—she had never said anything about her own guards. She hadn’t lied to him. She hadn’t cheated. She had just treated him like a piece of paper while giving the actual warmth of her life to the two monsters standing behind her.