Chapter 482: Lobby: The Eleanor POV

Eleanor WitchBourne sighed.

Nearly cursed. Got as far as the first syllable — the sharp, satisfying

f

already forming between her teeth — before she caught herself and swallowed it back down.

Ladies didn’t curse.

WitchBourne

women

especially didn’t curse. Hundred years of breeding and boarding schools and the constant, low-grade surveillance of a family that measured its worth in reputation rather than currency had beaten that particular impulse into submission long before Eleanor was old enough to know what the words meant.

But gods, she wanted to.

Seven

days.

Seven days she’d been sitting in this place—

this

admittedly

beautiful, obscenely expensive room on the forty-third floor of the Sovereign Tower

—

waiting.

Just... waiting. Like a parcel that had been delivered to the wrong address and was too polite to complain about it.

She’d arrived in Paradise ready to grovel like her father had asked her to. Ready to

swallow

every

ounce of pride

her father’s tears had left her and

offer

herself — her dignity, her fury, her bloody knuckles — to the Price family on a silver platter.

Ready to apologise to the man who’d walked into her office uninvited and put his hands on her body like it belonged to him.

Ready to do the worst thing she’d ever have to do.

And the Prices had made her wait.

Seven.

Fucking.

Days.

The

F

word had never felt so right!

No meeting, audience or schedule. Just calls and messages — always from assistants, never from anyone who mattered — telling her to

be

patient

.

To

remain available

.

To

stay comfortable and enjoy the accommodations

.

Stay comfortable.

As if comfort was the issue.

As if the problem was the thread count of the sheets and not the fact that she was

rotting

in a tower while the people who held her family’s future in their manicured hands couldn’t be arsed to give her a date.

The messages between the lines were clear enough.

[Sit tight

. Look pretty. Don’t make noise. Don’t ask questions. Don’t forget that the best thing you will ever accomplish in your life — your single greatest contribution to your

bloodline

— is being the

daughter

who married into a Legacy family and helped the WitchBournes climb from British old money to global relevance.]

That was it.

That was her ceiling.

Not her education, her mind and neither the charity she’d built from scratch at twenty. Not any of it. Just her body. Her bloodline. Her willingness to lie still and smile while a stranger claimed what her father had sold.

Eleanor wanted to scream.

Instead, she

exercised.

It was the only thing that kept her sane.

Mornings in the Tower’s private gym — empty, mercifully, at the hour she preferred. Weights. Core. The

punishing

routine she’d built for herself over years of channelling anger into something productive because the alternative was throwing very expensive furniture through very expensive windows.

Evenings

she ran.

Out through the Tower’s ground-level exit, into the streets of Paradise, and just — went. No route. No destination.

Just her legs and her lungs and the fading daylight turning the most beautiful place on Earth into something that looked like a painting she couldn’t afford and didn’t want.

Because Paradise

was

beautiful.

She’d give it that.

Annoyingly,

aggressively, almost insultingly beautiful — the kind of beautiful that made you feel worse about your own situation because the setting was so perfect that your misery looked ungrateful by comparison.

The streets were clean.

The air smelled like money and jasmine. The architecture was the kind of thing you’d see in magazines captioned

if only

and here it just — existed. Like it was nothing.

Like beauty on this scale was the baseline and everything else was a downgrade.

She ran through it and

hated it and loved it and hated that she loved it.

And when she wasn’t exercising, when the gym was occupied and the streets were too hot and her room had started to feel like a cell made of silk and marble —

She

sat

in the

lobby.

The Sovereign Tower lobby was entertainment.

Not good entertainment the kind Eleanor would have chosen.

But when your

options

were

stare at the ceiling of your room

or

stare at the ceiling of the lobby

, at least the lobby had people.

Movement.

The comforting background hum of lives being lived by people who weren’t trapped in diplomatic purgatory.

She’d found her spot on the third day. A deep chair in the corner near the south windows, angled so she could see the

main entrance

and the private elevators bank without being immediately visible herself.

A book in her lap — always open, rarely read — and a coffee that the lobby staff brought without being asked because they’d learned her habits faster than she’d learned theirs.

And from that chair, in that corner, Eleanor WitchBourne watched the circus.

It happened every time.

The boy

would enter the lobby —

or leave it, didn’t matter which direction

— and the building lost its collective mind.

Phei.

That was the name. She’d heard it so many times now it had stopped being a name and started being a weather event. Like

rain

or

thunder

or

that thing that happens when the barometric pressure drops and everyone gets a headache

.

The

female residents

would suddenly find reasons to be in the lobby. Staff members who’d been professionally invisible for hours would materialise near the front desk with urgent paperwork.

Women who’d been walking somewhere with purpose would stop, mid-stride, and just — stand there.

Watching.

Some of them asked for photographs. Selfies. A moment of his time. They’d approach with their phones already out and their composure already cracking, and he’d smile — that smile, the one that made grown women forget their own surnames — and

oblige.

Every. Single. Time.

Eleanor watched it from her chair with the

detached fascination

of a nature

documentary viewer

.

"And here we see the female of the

species

responding to the presence of the

dominant male.

Note the

dilation

of the pupils. The involuntary adjustment of the hair. The complete

abandonment

of dignity.

It was entertaining. She’d give it that. In a mildly horrifying, deeply confusing,

what-is-wrong-with-these-people

sort of way.

But not entertaining enough to get involved.

Because she didn’t understand it.

Genuinely.

She could see that the boy was attractive — she wasn’t blind, she had functioning eyes, she could acknowledge objective beauty the way you acknowledge a well-built bridge or a particularly striking sunset without wanting to throw yourself off or into either one.

But the

reaction

? The

mass hysteria

? The way these women — wealthy, educated, powerful women — turned into giggling puddles of need the moment he walked past?

No.

She didn’t get it.

He was a womanizer, for God’s sake. An actual, unrepentant, seemingly proud womanizer. Every time she saw him he was with a different woman. Sometimes two. Sometimes a whole entourage of them, trailing with him like a very attractive comet with a tail made entirely of broken hearts and questionable decisions.

And the rumours —

Oh, the

rumours.

That he was

sleeping

with his aunt. His actual aunt. Not some family friend someone casually called

auntie

— his aunt.

By blood or marriage? or whatever particular branch of the family tree he’d decided to climb and set fire to.

And both of them — the boy and the aunt in question — appeared to give

approximately zero fucks

about the fact that everyone in Paradise knew.

The rumours had found their way into every ear in the community, had been whispered across dining tables and dissected in group chats and probably discussed at whatever passed for church in a place where the residents’ net worth exceeded most countries’ GDP.

And they didn’t care.

Not even a little.

Whatever.

She didn’t care either.

Eleanor’s phone vibrated on the last day while she sat in the lobby tonight.

She pulled it from her lap, expecting another

be patient

message from another faceless assistant —

And stopped.

The notification was different. Formal. The Price family crest in the corner — that pretentious little seal she’d come to associate with the taste of bile — and beneath it, actual information. An actual date. An actual location.

[Meeting confirmed. Lady Abigail Price. Hell Paradise Island.

Two days

.]

Attached:

a shared ticket. Flight details. Accommodation arrangements on the island.

The full itinerary laid out with the clinical efficiency of people who organised lives the way other people organised spreadsheets.

Eleanor stared at the screen.

Seven days of nothing and now — this. Two days’ notice. Hell Paradise Island. Like they were inviting her to brunch.

She exhaled. Long. Slow. Through her nose.

Finally.

The waiting was over.

Whatever came next — whatever humiliation, whatever performance of contrition, whatever fresh hell the Price family had designed for her — at least it was

coming

. At least the

pur

gatory

had an end date now.

At least she could stop sitting in this lobby pretending to read a book she hadn’t turned the page of in three days.

She stood. Gathered her things. Started walking toward the elevators, scrolling through the itinerary — confirming the flight, checking the times, noting the dress code (

formal; the Prices will provide attire if necessary

, which was its own particular flavour of insulting) —

And walked directly into

someone’s back.

Hard.

*****

A/N:

It’s coming guyssss... finally! I have been waiting for this moment for so long!