Chapter 259: Wrong traffic light

Zoyar was sitting behind the wheel, and Lily sat in the passenger seat, and neither of them was making casual conversation.

The city moved past the windows in a blur of streetlights and evening traffic. They stopped at the red light. The signal turned green, and Zoyar drove straight through the intersection.

Lily’s head snapped up. She twisted in her seat and stared out the rear window at the turn they had just passed. “We missed it.” She turned back to face the road. “From that red light, we should have taken the left instead of going straight. My mistake.”

Zoyar said nothing. He drove the long way around, following the road until a U-turn came up, looped back toward the traffic light, and took the left that Lily had missed.

Ten minutes later she told him to turn right when she meant it was supposed to be left. He corrected and turned left. Five minutes after that, she told him to take the second exit at the roundabout when she meant the third. He took the third. Then she pointed at a street and told him it was the one, and it was not the one, and they had to reverse out of a dead end while an old man walking his dog stared at them through the windshield.

For one full hour Lily kept confusing her left with her right and her right with her left, and every direction she gave sent them into parts of the city she clearly did not recognise.

Zoyar pulled into a narrow street, parked the car against the curb, and turned off the engine. He leaned back in his seat and turned his attention to Lily. He did not speak, but his lips twisted to one side, and his eyes narrowed at her, studying her face with patience.

Lily caught his stare and laughed sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand. “I think that asshole’s punch got to my head too.”

“Hmmm.” Zoyar hummed low in his throat, the sound vibrating through the car’s silence. “You are right. You definitely cannot think straight about left and right. Now sit quietly and let me drive.”

Lily raised one brow at him. “Do you know how to get there?”

“Why would I not?” He turned the key, and the engine came back to life. “Take a rest. I will bring you home safely. Just don’t talk anymore. I am afraid you might ask me to go to the bridge and tell me to drive straight into the river.”

The sheepish smile on Lily’s face fell. She shrugged and settled deeper into her seat. Of course he knew her address. He had been stalking her at the cafe without missing a day.

A man like Zoyar would have her home address, her work schedule, her phone number, her emergency contacts, and probably a detailed file predicting what she would eat for breakfast the next day.

She had purposely directed him down the wrong path to see if he would follow without complaint. She waited, hoping he would eventually point out that she was leading him astray instead of simply accepting her lie without question.

He is simply letting her mislead him for fun… She was sure.

Lily watched the streetlights pass through the window and felt her eyelids growing heavier with each one. The warmth of the car pressed against her tired body and the low hum of the engine blurred with the distant sounds of traffic until everything softened into a comfortable, drowsy fog. She blinked once, twice, and on the third blink her eyes did not reopen.

Her eyes opened only when the car stopped and the engine cut off. The sudden silence pulled her out of sleep, and she blinked at the dim surroundings, her vision adjusting slowly to the concrete walls and fluorescent strip lights above her.

“Where are we?” she mumbled, barely awake, rubbing one eye with the heel of her hand.

“Parking garage.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Lily straightened in her seat and peered through the windshield at the rows of expensive cars lined up beneath a ceiling of exposed pipes and ventilation ducts. This was not the cramped, open-air parking lot behind her apartment building with the cracked asphalt and the flickering overhead light that had needed replacing for two years. “But there is no parking garage under my apartment.”

“It is where I live.”

Every trace of sleep vanished from Lily’s body in a single heartbeat. She sat bolt upright, her spine snapping straight, her brown eyes blowing wide as the words registered in her brain and detonated.

“What the fuck!” She turned her whole body toward him, her seatbelt straining against her shoulder. “You said you would take me to my home!”

Zoyar’s expression did not change. He sat with one hand resting on the steering wheel and his dark eyes fixed on her with composed calm.

“I said I would take you home,” he corrected. “Whose home? I never mentioned. And you agreed. FYI.”

Lily’s jaw dropped. It hung open for a full three seconds while her brain scrambled to process the sheer audacity of what she had just heard. He had tricked her. While she was exhausted and concussed and half-asleep, he had taken the words she agreed to, twisted them inside out, and driven her to his apartment instead of hers.

“Stop messing with me,” she warned, pointing one finger at his face.

Zoyar did not flinch. He unbuckled his seatbelt and shifted in his seat to face her fully, resting his arm across the top of the steering wheel.

“I am not messing with you. With your head not working properly, I decided you would stay at my place tonight.” He raised one finger. “You need someone to keep an eye on you.” A second finger joined the first. “Because who knows, you might confuse the bathtub for the bed and sleep inside it. And then you will catch a fever the next day.” Then he raised the third finger. “And then I will have to rush across the city to your apartment at three in the morning to take you to the hospital.” He lowered his hand. “So I saved my time. And I saved you from harming yourself. You are welcome.”

Lily stared at him while the most ridiculous chain of logic she had ever heard settled in the air between them.

Bathtub.

Bed.

Fever.

Hospital.

He had built an entire disaster timeline inside his head to justify bringing her to his apartment and had delivered it with the straight face of a man presenting a quarterly business report.

“Take me to my home,” Lily demanded.

“You are staying here.”

“Fine.” She undid her seatbelt. “I will just catch a taxi and head home.”

“Go ahead,” Zoyar replied, leaning back in his seat, arms crossed over his chest, showing no inclination to stop her. “If the guards let you through, then by all means, you’re free to go. Just a heads-up—this place is crawling with all sorts of criminals, from psychopaths in the mafia to serial killers.”

All of Lily’s courage faded in an instant. She shot Zoyar a fierce glare. “You better be ready to pamper me,” she said, opening the car door and slamming it shut so hard that the sound made her flinch.

A wide grin spread across Zoyar’s face. “I knew you were the most intelligent female I have ever met.”

*

Cassian took Cixi and Sashkia to his building, the Casanova, a tower he owned in the Demond City that housed a private floor of guest rooms designed for people whose names carried weight and whose presence required discretion. The rooms were no less than presidential suites of a five-star hotel, each one fitted with marble floors, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, and furniture that cost more than most people earned in a year.

Sashkia settled into hers without complaint. She ran her fingers along the back of an armchair, surveyed the bedroom, and gave a nod that said the room met her standards but did not exceed them.

Cassian arranged her security personally. Four guards were stationed at the corridor entrance, two at the elevator, and one outside her door. He spoke with each of them in a voice low enough that Cixi, standing ten feet away, could not hear a word but could tell from the way the guards straightened that every instruction carried a consequence for failure.

Once everything was in place, Cassian turned to Cixi.

He did not say a word. He extended his hand, and she took it. And the world folded.

One second they stood in the hallway of the Casanova with Sashkia’s guards at their backs. The next second they stood in Cassian’s living room at the Crown Palace.

Cixi released Cassian’s hand and took a few steps into the room, turning slowly, her grey eyes sweeping the familiar space as though confirming it was real and she had not just imagined being transported across the city in the time it took to blink.

“I do not think I can ever get used to teleportation. It is fascinating, but I still cannot believe you can actually do that.”

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