Chapter 210: Chapter 210: The Gift
Chapter 210: The Gift
The office went silent.
For one long stretch, even breathing seemed to disappear. The only thing left was the pulse under the ribs, alive and too loud in a room that should have belonged to medicine, paperwork, and clean clinical order.
Yvonne’s gaze rested on the tie around Elias’s pale waist.
Her expression did not change.
The knot was beautiful. Deliberate. Not the practical knot of a doctor tying a piece of workwear before walking into a meeting, but the sort used on a wrapped present. Centered. Neat. Almost sweet, if the meaning behind it had not been so openly wicked.
Elias’s fingers slid over the fabric as if he meant to untie it.
He did not.
He only brushed across it, light as a tease, and looked up at her from the chair.
"Dr. Quinn," he said slowly, making each word land. "Do you like the gift?"
His lashes lowered.
The rest of the unwrapping, clearly, had been left to her.
Yvonne knew what he was pointing at.
Patients sent gifts. So did donors, grateful families, ambitious hospital board members, and people who wanted her attention for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine. Yvonne did not open them. If she could return them, she returned them untouched. If she could not, they were donated through proper channels.
But this gift?
Yvonne looked down at Elias and said nothing.
Her silence gave him room, and Elias used it immediately.
He slipped off the chair with the fluidity of something boneless, winding himself around her before she could reasonably pretend the situation was still professional. His arms hooked around her shoulders. His legs locked close, trapping her with the shameless insistence of a boy who knew exactly how fragile he could look while causing trouble.
"Come on," he coaxed, rocking against her just enough to be impossible to ignore. "A gift walked right to your door and you still won’t open it? Open it, Dr. Quinn. Open it."
Cheap.
Low.
Obvious.
Like cash in small bills, vulgar enough to make a person look away. But when the amount grew large enough, even vulgarity turned into one of the cruelest poisons in the world.
Somewhere in the struggle, they started kissing again.
It was not neat this time. It had none of the strict, contained pressure of the restroom stall. Elias was restless, greedy, always shifting where she expected him to stay still. Yvonne had to catch his wrists once, then his waist, then the back of his shirt. His mouth tasted faintly of coffee and trouble.
By the time she set him down on the desk, the files beside him had shifted out of place.
His back hit the cold surface with a dull sound. He gave a soft grunt, but the look on his face only brightened, as if the impact had made the game better. His legs hooked around her again. He tipped his chin up, eyes shining, and reached for the front of her white coat.
That spoiled, demanding look made Yvonne think of a child asking for ice cream after being told no.
To compare this reckless little devil to a pure child was its own kind of sin.
Yvonne caught his hands and pulled him off her before he could make more of a mess.
"Stop."
Elias sat up on the desk, lips pushed into a sulky line. "I’m not making trouble. I’m serious." His voice lowered, direct and bright with want. "I want you."
He spoke as though the subject were indeed hidden ice cream, sweet and forbidden and owed to him.
Behind Yvonne’s gold-rimmed glasses, a thread of helplessness finally touched her eyes. Her voice softened by a degree.
"We can go home," she said. "When we leave, then we can do whatever you want. All right?"
It was a concession.
Elias still refused it.
He shook his head. "No. I have to go back to my own place tonight."
He had plans with Giselle tomorrow.
Yvonne understood enough to guess. "That girl."
At the mention of Giselle, Elias’s expression changed.
He planted both hands on the desk and looked down at his feet, which hung above the floor. They swung lightly, almost childlike.
"Giselle?" he said. "What about her?"
"Did you get her?"
Yvonne’s tone was level.
The question left a thin thread of guilt inside her anyway. A doctor in a hospital office, discussing a girl’s fall with the very devil arranging it.
Elias laughed softly. "Guess."
Yvonne did not answer.
Her face did it for her.
The way Elias and Giselle had looked together earlier, the way the girl had held him, the way he had leaned into her, crying as if she were the only safe thing left in the world. To say nothing had happened would be difficult to believe.
Elias shook his head.
At some point, he had kicked off his shoes. His feet, wrapped in white socks, crossed at the ankles as they swung lazily beneath the desk.
"You guessed wrong." His smile turned cruel in a way that did not bother hiding itself. "I haven’t taken her yet. Or rather, I don’t want to take her yet."
Yvonne watched him.
"She’s too cute," Elias said. "If all I did was trick her into bed, where would the fun be? I want to see how she looks when she cries because of me."
He lifted one foot. His toes moved inside the sock, small and precise, like fingers pressing invisible piano keys.
"When she’s willing to kneel and kiss my feet," he said lightly, "maybe I’ll let her go."
Yvonne’s eyes deepened.
No emotion showed cleanly on her face.
The malice was too thick. It did not even look like ordinary cruelty. It looked like a criminal standing free after the verdict, smiling because the law had failed to name what he was.
No.
Worse than that.
Elias did not seem to believe it was evil at all.
To him, this was a game. Games were false things. Nobody blamed the player for what happened inside the board.
He lowered the raised leg and crossed it over the other, chin tilted with a proud, pleased little air.
"So, Dr. Quinn," he said, "don’t fall in love with me."
Then his mouth curved downward, and sadness moved across his face as quickly as light passing over water. "Otherwise, I’ll be upset."
His expression changed too easily.
Sweet. Cruel. Sad. Proud. Innocent.
There was no use trying to decide which one was real.
A devil did not need a fixed face.
Yvonne exhaled slowly.
It was the first breath that could be clearly heard in the room.
When she looked at him again, her eyes had become very clear.
She stepped forward. "Look at me."
Elias lifted one leg and set his foot against her chest, stopping her advance with the sole of his sock. His lips curled.
"What?" he teased. "This is a hospital, Dr. Quinn."
He thought she had changed her mind, so he began to bait her again.
Yvonne removed her glasses.
Without the gold frames, her eyes looked deeper, darker, and far less human in their stillness.
Elias’s gaze caught on them before he meant it to.
Her eyes were like a whirlpool. No, that was too pretty a word. They were a locked room with no handle inside, and the moment he looked directly into them, some part of his attention sank.
"After you leave the hospital," Yvonne said softly, "you will forget me."
Her voice had always been magnetic, low and pleasant enough to make patients listen before they knew they had obeyed. Now something else moved inside it. Not volume. Not force.
Authority.
The kind that made instruction feel like gravity.
If she told someone to die, Elias thought, that person might walk calmly out of the world.
His pupils tightened.
This woman was cheating.
Elias knew Yvonne could hypnotize people. He had expected equipment, perhaps. Medical induction, neurological stimulation, layered suggestion, memory work done through machines too expensive for ordinary hospitals and too unethical for public records.
Not this.
Not one look. One sentence. No preparation.
And yet his mind had already begun to blur at the edges.
Fortunately, the Trash Trope Intervention Division had safeguards for this exact kind of nonsense. No employee could have the soul altered, rewritten, commanded, or erased by any force inside a mission world.
Yvonne could be a cheat character. She could be a saint, a monster, a god in a white coat.
It would not reach the part of him that belonged outside her world.
Elias blinked once.
Then he smiled.
"What are you doing?" he asked. "Hypnosis? I can do that too."
His eyes curved, wicked and bright.
"I order you to kiss my foot right now."
Yvonne took his small foot in one hand and moved it away from her chest.
Her grip was gentle.
Her voice was warm, as if nothing had happened at all.
"Put your shoes on," she said. "You’ll catch cold."
