CHAPTER 137: EDNAR

"Hellen," said a handsome young man with blonde hair and grey eyes as he walked in, concern evident in his expression.

"...are you okay?" He intruded her personal space without care, completely ignoring the pink-haired young man that stood with his head hung low, as if Riley were nothing more than a piece of furniture in the room.

"I... I’m fine," she said as Ednar held her, giving a smile that would steal the heart of any man who had no defense against her natural charm. Quite deftly she cast a side glance at Riley, expecting to see some flicker of jealousy, tightened jaw, clenched fists, just something. But... he didn’t seem to care. In fact, it was as though he wasn’t even affected in the slightest by her being this close to Ednar. His posture remained unchanged, his breathing steady, his eyes focused somewhere beyond them both as if witnessing something far more interesting than her intimate moment with another man.

Well, it was unreasonable to consider him being affected by it in the first place—after all, he’d made his feelings perfectly clear—however this still irritated the young lady given she was used to being longed for, desired, coveted like a precious gem that men would kill to possess.

She had always had this natural ability to draw attention to herself, and it was something she noticed from quite a tender age. Even as a child, conversations would halt when she entered a room, heads would turn, and adults would stumble over their words in her presence. It was due to this very ability that she, with time, cultivated this... skill to read people. It was more intuitive than learned, an instinct honed through countless interactions where she’d learned to decipher the subtle tells of human desire.

The ability to tell when someone was looking at her with one of three emotions: Lust, Love—the soft, worshipful look that placed her on an impossible pedestal; and Hate—the bitter, resentful stare of those who despised her for having what they could never obtain.

But all she sensed from this young man, from the very day the met, was one thing and one thing alone: Possessiveness.

Yet it wasn’t the possessiveness she expected. No, this was something else entirely—cold and strangely impersonal.

He didn’t look at her as a ’woman,’ and that was one of the things that unnerved her most. She had spent three whole days in that hotel with him before the guards had found them, and all through that time, all through these days since, the young man had barely looked at her. Not in the way she was used to, anyway. His eyes would pass over her as if she were a tool, a means to an end rather than an end in herself.

He was always thinking about a certain princess, his lips moving silently as he lost himself in memories and fantasies that didn’t include her. No matter how much she tried to piece together his fragmented mumblings, she didn’t know who he was referring to. After all, most of what he said were inner thoughts that leaked out, so they made no coherent sense. The only thing she was able to pick up was that he was obsessed with some princess—utterly, completely, destructively obsessed.

It was because of this princess that her ’charms’ were completely worthless on him, like trying to seduce a statue or convince the wind to change direction.

During those three days, the young man didn’t even look at her once with lust. His gaze, when it fell on her at all, was clinical, detached, as if he were studying a particularly uninteresting specimen. Yes, she was greatly relieved by this—she’d feared far worse when she first realized her predicament—but at the same time, it made her reassess everything she thought she knew about herself.

Wasn’t she as irresistible as she thought?

Wasn’t she beautiful? She’d built her entire identity around this single, unshakeable truth, and now it crumbled like sand between her fingers.

Truly, women are strange creatures.

Those three days had planted a seed of doubt in her heart, and she unconsciously began to seek his opinion—of course not directly, her pride would never allow such vulnerability. That was why when Ednar, this young man who was her secret lover, had hugged her, the subconscious part of her that desperately wanted to see Riley react to something pertaining to her had made her look at him. She was secretly hopeful to see some form of jealousy, some crack in his indifferent armor that would help her regain her confidence that she was truly irresistible.

But sadly...

Indifference.

That was all she got from his surface thoughts, his carefully controlled expression, his deliberately relaxed posture.

Well, she could sense something else though, however she suspected it was from the bond they shared and not his direct feelings.

A deep possessiveness, yes, but not for her.

But after that...

Nothing.

It seemed the young man didn’t lie when he said he had no feelings for her whatsoever. But this only made her insecurities worse, multiplying them until they consumed her thoughts. How was it possible for her not to instantly grab the attention of someone she literally, for the first time in her life, wanted to be ’looked at’ by?

She hated this feeling with every fiber of her being.

This feeling that there was some girl out there, so much better than her that this imbecile was literally obsessed with her memory. The thought that she had been a frog in a narrow well all her life, believing herself a queen when she was merely another face in an endless crowd.

’NO!’

... and there it was, her narcissism rising like a protective wall, refusing to let her believe such devastating truths.

There was no way she couldn’t make this man fall hopelessly for her. It was impossible. She was Hellen—beautiful, irresistible, unforgettable.

This hurt her pride more than any physical wound ever could, and she was slowly becoming fixated on someone she was supposed to kill at the academy.

This could go bad in several ways.

’I am a goddess!’

... okay, maybe she was also crazy.

But who cares?

The young man himself was not sane in any way.

And that was what the young girl didn’t know. Riley had already lost his sanity long before she had met him. In fact, he was barely sane from the moment he had received his memories of his previous life, as the memories came with all the emotions his past self felt—love, loss, betrayal, and an agony so profound it had rewritten the very fabric of his being. To make matters worse, he had clearly recalled disturbing details of every single iteration he had spent in the cursed realm of a certain goddess, reliving countless lifetimes that had nearly driven him mad with their repetitive cruelty.

It was a wonder he had survived all these memories with his sanity intact, but what little sanity he had possessed was long gone now, shattered completely after the months he spent tied and constantly brainwashed by Maria.

So yeah, he was a lost cause from the very start.

"And... who are you?" Ednar asked, finally acknowledging the pink-hair, as he felt an inexplicable threat radiating from this young man.

"Riley... you can call me Riley," he said with a smile that belonged on no human face—the kind of expression only demons wear when offering a single coin in exchange for a soul.