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

Chapter 432: Chapter-431

"Your cardiac rhythm is accelerating past the safety threshold for a standard waltz," Elara noted, her brow knitting together in a rare, barely visible micro-expression of confusion. "There is an active malfunction in your system, Julian. You are experiencing distress."

"Oh, am I?" Julian leaned down slightly, his silver hair brushing against her temple as he spoke directly into her ear, his voice trembling with a mixture of intense pain and forced nonchalance. "Maybe I’m just tired of playing the pretty prop next to an empty throne, Your Highness. Or maybe I’m just realizing that your ’administrative efficiency’ extends much further into the night than I originally calculated."

Elara tilted her head back slightly, her vacant glass-bead eyes locking onto his. "What does the nighttime schedule have to do with your current performance metrics?"

Julian froze for a fraction of a second, his footing faltering just enough for his boot to clip the floor before his royal training instantly corrected the mistake. He stared at her blank, unbothered face, and the sheer, agonizing truth of the situation hit him all over again. She didn’t know. She didn’t have a single clue that her open shirt, her bruised skin, and the smug, bare-chested commanders standing in her quarters had completely destroyed him. She wasn’t hiding it to be cruel; she simply didn’t think he was a high-enough priority to warrant a lie.

"Nothing," Julian whispered, his smile returning—cold, hollow, and utterly superficial as he spun her one last time before the music began to wind down. "It has absolutely nothing to do with it. Forget I said anything, Master."

He used the title like a knife, his voice dripping with a quiet, lethal irony.

Down at the edge of the floor, Ken’s dark eyes narrowed as he watched the prince lean so close to her, his hand resting on his sword hilt with a heavy, restless tension. Beside him, Mahir’s ears twitched backward, his tail giving a sharp, warning snap against the marble pillar. They could see the prince breaking, but they could also see Elara’s eyes—usually so vacant and still—lingering on Julian’s face with a strange, analytical persistence that neither of them had ever seen before.

The final notes of the waltz drifted up toward the painted ceiling, dissolving into the roar of polite applause from the surrounding nobility. Julian didn’t let his hand linger on her waist for a single unnecessary second. The moment the music ceased, he dropped his arm, stepped back exactly two paces, and executed a flawless, textbook bow. The charming, nonchalant smile remained pinned to his face, a perfect shield against the prying eyes of the court.

"An immaculate performance, Your Highness," Julian said, his baritone voice smooth, carrying just enough volume for the nearby ministers to hear.

Elara didn’t answer immediately. Her vacant, glass-bead eyes were still fixed on his face, tracking the slight tremor in his jaw and the hollow, freezing depth in his ice-blue eyes. That strange, tight pressure in her chest cavity hadn’t faded; if anything, it had intensified, localized entirely behind her sternum. It was a deeply inefficient physical sensation.

As they turned to walk back toward the grand dais, side by side, Julian leaned in slightly. The public smile stayed on his lips, but his voice dropped into a sharp, lethal murmur meant only for her.

"You can stop staring at me like I’m a malfunctioning water pump, Elara," he taunted, his tone dripping with a lazy, bitter irony. "It’s getting a little redundant, don’t you think? Go back to counting the silverware or calculating the grain tariffs."

Elara’s pace didn’t falter, but her brow twitched into a small, rare line of confusion. "Your behavioral output remains inconsistent with your previous baseline. The data suggests an unresolved internal variable is causing a systematic error in your conduct."

Julian let out a short, quiet scoff, shaking his head as his silver hair caught the golden candlelight. He looked out over the crowded ballroom, his expression entirely relaxed, though his knuckles were white inside his pockets.

"See, that right there?" Julian murmured, turning his head just enough to give her a sharp, mocking look. "That is exactly what I mean. I am begging you, just for once, to use a simple tone. Speak like a normal human being. I cannot understand your documentary words. I don’t have a dictionary on me to translate whatever legal script you’re running in that head of yours."

Elara paused at the base of the dais steps. ’A simple tone.’

The request introduced a major conceptual hurdle to her current processing sequence. Her entire linguistic framework was built on absolute precision, data metrics, and technical accuracy. Stripping away her standard vocabulary felt like attempting to draft an imperial decree using only a child’s basic reading blocks. It was an inefficient, highly unoptimized method of communication.

But as she looked up at him, seeing the raw, suffocating exhaustion hidden just behind his brilliant, fake smile, the strange friction in her heart flared up again. Her medical diagnosis could wait. Right now, the prince was experiencing a severe communication barrier. If she had to adjust her parameters to resolve the glitch, then she would.

She closed her eyes for a brief millisecond, clearing the complex algorithms from her immediate thoughts, searching for the rawest, simplest words available in her database.

She opened her eyes, locking her dead, vacant gaze onto his.

"Are you... hurt?" Elara asked.

Her voice sounded entirely different. Without the technical jargon, without the percentages and the dry, administrative pacing, it was just a flat, stark, and quiet question. It was unpolished. Raw.

Julian completely froze. His foot stayed hovering over the first step of the dais, his nonchalant mask slipping for a fraction of a second to reveal a flash of pure, unadulterated shock. He hadn’t expected her to actually try. He hadn’t expected to hear her voice sound so strangely... bare.

But the shock was instantly swallowed by a fresh wave of bitter, burning pain. ’Hurt?’ He wanted to laugh. He wanted to scream at her. How could she look at him and ask that so calmly, when she was the one who had ripped his chest open without even trying?

He quickly recovered, pulling his lazy smirk back over his face like a visor as he stepped up onto the dais and took his seat. He leaned back in his grand chair, casually crossing one leg over the other, completely unbothered on the outside.

"Hurt? Me? Don’t be ridiculous, Your Highness," Julian replied smoothly, his voice returning to that effortless, teasing purr as he picked up his wine glass. "I am a prince of the North. A little winter wind doesn’t bother me. I’m perfectly fine. Efficient, even. Isn’t that the word you like?"

Elara sat down beside him, her midnight velvet gown settling around her. She evaluated his answer using her newly restricted, simple parameters. ’He says he is fine. But his eyes are dark. His hands are shaking.’

"You are lying," Elara stated flatly, her voice low and direct, completely stripped of its usual bureaucratic armor. "Your face is smiling, but your eyes look like... crying."

Julian’s hand tightened so hard around the stem of his wine glass that the crystal let out a faint, ominous creak. He didn’t look at her.