Chapter 84 Elijah Is Indeed Frightening
Chapter 84 Elijah Is Indeed Frightening
"Elijah!" Elena hit his marble-hard broad chest with the last of her strength, her beautiful face now feeling like it was about to explode from both embarrassment and arousal at her lover's blunt words.
She buried her hot face in the crook of Elijah's neck, inhaling the masculine scent of sandalwood that had become an addiction for her over the past year.
"You're really a bastard! This place is a new jewelry design studio, not our apartment bedroom!"
Elijah chuckled lowly, a sexy laugh that vibrated in his chest, feeling extremely satisfied that he had successfully silenced Elena's official interrogation with absolute victory.
Elena's simple logic was once again tightly locked inside the golden cage he had built, burying deep any suspicion about his true identity as the highest dragon of the Blackwood clan.
He tightened his protective embrace, holding Elena's slender waist firmly while staring straight at the studio's glass window covered in night snow. Behind his lover's back, Elijah's right hand discreetly typed a short cyber encryption code on his smartwatch for Marcus.
\[Marcus, make sure Vivian Sterling cannot leave her hotel in lower Manhattan tomorrow morning. If she tries to contact Alaric again, freeze all her satellite numbers.\]
This grand charade had been running for a year, and Elijah Blackwood would ensure that every second of the remaining two and a half years of their contract would proceed under the absolute law he himself had written, to preserve the sanctity of his little paradise with Elena.
Elijah released his tight embrace very slowly, as if every inch of movement away from Elena's perimeter was a great loss. He cupped Elena's chin, tilting her still-flushed beautiful face upward, then brushed his thumb over his lover's full lips, slightly swollen from his earlier kiss.
"Very well, if my Employer insists that this is a workplace," Elijah said, his baritone voice vibrating with a neatly arranged sexy tone.
"Then your IT assistant will take you home to The Azure apartment right now. The snowstorm outside is getting worse, and I don't want my Ángel to get sick before she can touch that ten-carat diamond."
Elena could only snort in resignation, hiding the glint in her eyes filled with love that increasingly locked their fate together. She picked up her digital pen lying on the marble floor, then walked side by side with Elijah toward the studio's large, encrypted teak door.
The next morning, lower Manhattan was paralyzed by a twenty-centimeter thick layer of snow. However, inside the presidential suite of a five-star VVIP hotel in the Wall Street area, the atmosphere was far more frozen and tense.
Vivian Sterling stood in the middle of the room in her thin silk nightgown, throwing her gold-layered digital device onto the leather sofa with explosive aristocratic anger. Her beautiful face, usually filled with thick cunning, was now flushed red from extreme frustration.
"How could all my cards be rejected?!" Vivian roared at her personal assistant, who stood trembling near the suite door.
"I am the sole heir of the Sterling clan! All of Europe's raw diamond supply is under my fingertips! And you're telling me New York's banking system blocked all my accounts due to a conventional 'cyber anomaly'?!"
"M-My apologies, Miss Sterling," the assistant replied in a frightened voice.
"It's not just your accounts. Our private jet at JFK airport just had its flight permit revoked by aviation authorities due to manifest encryption issues. And... when I tried to contact Mr. Alaric Blackwood via satellite phone, our network was suddenly cut off automatically by a private cyber wall called Apex Sovereign."
Hearing the name Apex Sovereign, Vivian Sterling instantly froze. All the air in her lungs seemed to stop. She remembered the icy cold glint from the sapphire blue eyes of the red plaid flannel man at the SoHo studio yesterday afternoon.
'Elijah...' Vivian's mind trembled violently between disbelief and deep terror.
'That naughty child, he really locked my throat in New York just because I disturbed his discarded woman?!'
Vivian clenched her fists until her nails turned white. Her great ego as London's highest socialite, hired by Alaric to break this commoner's drama, now crumbled into a new madness.
Elijah Blackwood turned out to be far more destructive and dangerous than all the rumors circulating on the London Stock Exchange over the past year.
Meanwhile, on the second floor of Elena Vance Atelier, the atmosphere was completely opposite. The warmth of the air conditioning and the scent of sandalwood accompanied Elena, who was already sitting upright at her high-tech designer work desk.
On the black marble counter surface, the velvet box containing the Sterling clan's raw ten-carat pink diamond lay open.
Its magical gleam reflected in Elena's brown eyes, sparking a new, profound inspiration.
Elena closed her eyes for a moment, letting her past memories spin. Her simple logic no longer thought about Vivian Sterling or Alaric Blackwood's threats, but instead focused on an old memento belonging to her late mother, Eleanor Vance, which she always kept in her work bag.
Her mother had been a woman crushed by the greed of the financial caste, yet she never lost her dignity until the end of her life.
'This tiara...' Elena thought with surging confidence.
'I will not design it to worship the arrogance of the Blackwood clan. I will shape this pink diamond into a medieval Gothic masterpiece that symbolizes a mother's tears and resilience. I will name it "Eleanor's Crown."'
Elena's slender fingers began to move with extraordinary fluidity across the digital sketch pad, creating sharp silhouettes in an ancient architectural style that blended the softness of rose petals with the solid structure of a silver dragon's defense.
Her focus was so intense that she did not notice the presence of a tall figure standing silently at the threshold of the private showroom.
The young man leaned against the doorframe in his signature loose red plaid flannel shirt, crossing both arms over his marble-hard broad chest.
His sapphire blue eyes dimmed with absolute possessive obsession as he gazed at the side profile of Elena's face, so serious and captivating under the LED spotlights.
Over the past year, Elijah had been an invisible shield, crushing anyone who tried to scratch his little paradise.
And seeing how his contract lover fought so hard with high dignity to protect him—the man she thought was just a poor IT technician—made the highest dragon's arrogance soften in destructive waves of love.
Elijah stepped forward without making a sound on the blood-red velvet carpet.
He placed a cup of warm espresso beside Elena's work desk, then crept down, wrapping both his strong arms around Elena's slender shoulders from behind, burying his handsome face in the curve of the woman's neck.