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

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."

The tightening friction behind Elara’s ribs gripped her fiercely, a sudden, heavy throb that made her fingers twitch against the dark velvet of her gown. She checked her internal baseline—no poison detected, no foreign magical signatures, no biological anomalies. Yet, the discomfort was real. It was entirely centered around the visual data of Julian’s complete collapse. This cheerful, arrogant prince who had arrived at her border with a brilliant, mocking smile was fading into a hollow, bleeding shadow right next to her. And her system was registering it as a critical error.

"I am stopping," Elara said flatly, her voice softer now, stripped of all imperial authority. "I am using the simple words. But you are not helping me find the problem. If you are in pain, you must tell me where it is."

Julian opened his eyes, turning his head slowly to look at her. The nonchalant mask was completely gone now, shattered into a thousand jagged pieces that left his raw, bleeding pride entirely exposed. His ice-blue eyes were bright with unshed, bitter tears, burning with a mix of furious anger and deep, hopeless despair.

"The pain is right here, Elara," he whispered, his voice trembling as he placed his gloved hand flat against his own chest, right over his hammering heart. "It’s right here. Because I was stupid enough to think that I could find a quiet place beside you. I thought if I played my part, if I smiled, if I kept out of your way, we could just... exist together. I thought I could have one person in this miserable court who belonged to me."

He leaned in closer, his breath hot against her cheek, his tone dropping into a fierce, suffocating accusation.

"But you don’t belong to anyone, do you? Or rather, you belong to the monsters standing at the bottom of these steps. You let them mark you. You let them hold you. And then you walk out here in your perfect black dress and ask me why my heart rate is fluctuating." He let out a sharp, breathless sob, quickly choking it back down. "I see everything, Elara. I’m a royal prince. I know how the world works. But seeing them in your room... seeing what they did to you... it makes me feel like a complete, utter fool."

Elara sat perfectly still, the words washing over her like a freezing wave.

Her calculated mind immediately tried to run a cross-analysis of his statement. *Belong. Room. Marks. Knights.* The data points clicked into place with a sudden, heavy finality. He had seen the finger marks on her waist. He had seen the bite on her neck. He had seen Ken and Mahir standing half-bare in her private quarters last night.

To her, those marks were simply the physical byproduct of a highly efficient, mutually agreed-upon stress relief protocol. Ken and Mahir were her assets, her protectors, the constants she had chosen to keep her grounded in a world of political noise. It had nothing to do with the northern trade treaty. It had nothing to do with Clause Twelve.

But as she looked at Julian’s face—at the raw, agonizing devastation tearing through his features—she realized that her logic had completely failed to account for his human variable. He wasn’t tracking the legal clauses. He was tracking her.

Before she could form a response, a sharp, heavy clank of metal echoed from the base of the dais.

Ken had stepped forward, his dark eyes flashing with a dangerous, lethal heat as he watched Julian lean so close to the Regent. His hand was resting firmly on his sword hilt, his posture coiled like a spring, ready to draw his blade the moment Elara gave the slightest sign of distress. Right beside him, Mahir’s massive frame shifted, his beast-kin ears pinning flat against his head as a low, feral rumble vibrated deep in his chest. His long dark tail lashed hard against the marble floor, a clear, territorial warning to the foreign prince to step back.