Chapter 115
The night wind made the terrace air increasingly cold.
Alaric's question hung between them.
Diana didn't answer immediately. She simply raised her eyes to study him quietly. Those clear eyes showed neither embarrassed offense nor panicked discomfort—only an almost clinical assessment.
She seemed to be examining not a man pressuring her, but an interesting case study.
"The definition of partnership depends on its objective," she finally replied, her voice slightly scattered by the wind yet steady. "If our goal is performing for the audience in the ballroom, then we're doing quite well."
She refused his intimate topic, declining to discuss whether their relationship was emotional or merely physical. Instead, she used cool, almost cruel logic to pull him back to reality.
The darkness in his eyes churned more intensely. He despised this feeling of losing control, hated how easily she could escape his emotional traps completely unscathed.
Diana gave him no opportunity to press further. She shifted sideways, her shoulder dipping slightly as she slipped through the narrow gap between his arm and the wall without hesitation—as if his seemingly unbreakable confinement had never existed.
"The performance is over. I should go."
She placed his still-warm jacket on the railing and walked away, her departing figure resolute.
Rupert stared at his empty arms, then at the jacket. He laughed softly again—a sound containing both the pleasure of meeting a worthy opponent and a trace of frustration he himself didn't recognize.
He put the jacket back on, adjusted his mask, and followed her.
---
When Diana reappeared in the ballroom, every eye turned toward her.
Her dress remained stained, but her demeanor was even more composed than before. Her poise transformed those stains into a kind of badge of honor.
Leila's heart sank.
Then Mr. K's figure appeared behind Diana. He strode unhurriedly to her side, his powerful presence immediately commanding the room.
He surveyed the gathering, his deep eyes revealing nothing yet causing an inexplicable unease in everyone who met his gaze.
The York brothers instinctively straightened their posture. Leila turned deathly pale, barely able to stand.
Alaric's gaze settled on Diana before sweeping across the room again. His tone turned icy and sharp. "Ms. Diana York is my most important partner. I dislike my partners experiencing any form of unpleasantness."
Without naming names or mentioning the recent incident, he simply stated his boundaries as fact.
"I don't wish to see tonight's events repeated."
As his words landed, Leila swayed, steadied only by Matilda's quick support.
She stared at Diana and Alaric standing side by side—one cool as moonlight, one powerful as a mountain. The harmony of the image was painfully perfect.
She realized that no matter how hard she tried, she had only succeeded in proving her own foolishness.
Idris's expression darkened considerably. He had thought he'd sold Diana for a good price, never imagining she would immediately align herself with Mr. K—a connection even more mysterious and immeasurable than the Russell family.
For the first time, his gaze toward Diana contained genuine wariness and respect.
From a corner, Dennis watched wide-eyed, a broad grin spreading across his face as he secretly gave Diana a thumbs-up.
Diana was amazing, and her friend even more impressive!
In the lounge area, Mason tapped his cane lightly on the floor, a complex light flashing in his cloudy eyes.
Beside him, Alvina's expression had deteriorated to its worst.
This spectacle concluded in a way none had anticipated.
---
When the gala ended, Alaric had disappeared.
Diana returned to the Russell Manor alone and went straight upstairs.
The room was quiet. She removed the stiff gown and stepped into the bathroom, letting warm water wash away both the physical stains and the night's pretense and calculations.
Emerging, she glanced at her silenced phone on the nightstand.
The screen was lit with an unread message from an unknown number.
She opened it:
[Ms. York, don't think marrying into the Russell family solves everything. Do you really understand the truth about your substitute marriage? Your dear sister isn't as innocent as she seems. Stay in your place, or I won't hesitate to let everyone know how you stole your sister's marriage and became Rupert's wife.]
A clear threat.
Diana's expression remained unchanged. She calmly saved the number in an encrypted contact group labeled "Rats," then tossed the phone aside without replying or showing the slightest interest.
To her, such amateur provocations were merely background noise, not worth a second of her energy.
Her real concern lay elsewhere.
Diana sat at her desk and opened her laptop.
The screen immediately displayed a monitoring interface filled with complex data—her privately built backend connected to all the life support equipment in Rupert's adjacent room.
She pulled up the evening's data records, her fingertips moving swiftly across the trackpad to convert the information into visual waveforms.
Most of the time, all readings remained flat as a line, consistent with a deeply comatose patient's characteristics.
However, around 10:15 PM, an anomalous fluctuation appeared, clearly marked with a red dot by the system.
This coincided with the moment she and Dennis finished their first dance, when the atmosphere reached a small climax.
This was not a physiological response a vegetative patient should have.
The fluctuation was so weak and brief that standard hospital monitoring systems would automatically filter it as instrument error.
But "Athena's" algorithm wouldn't.
Could a patient in a vegetative state have emotional reactions to external social events?
Diana isolated this data segment and magnified it repeatedly.
Then she pulled up another time point: 10:40 PM.
This was when Alaric appeared in the ballroom and publicly declared her his partner.
No emotional fluctuation...
Wait.
She picked up her phone and looked at the number she had just saved. Her fingertip hovered over it momentarily before she set it down again.
Rather than tracking down this rat hiding in the shadows, she found herself more interested in something else.
Finally, her lips curved into a faint, somewhat playful smile.
So that was it.
This game was far more intriguing than she had imagined.