The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 66

The Heiress He Underestimated

Chapter 66 The Patron’s Dinner

The day of the patron’s dinner started weird. No rain, no wind, nothing. Just this heavy, thick silence that made the whole world feel like it was waiting for something bad to happen.

Inside the cliff house though, things were moving. Frost and his people were everywhere, checking things, talking in those quiet voices security people use when they’re being all professional and deadly serious. Simon was in the medical wing packing up a bag of emergency stuff for Drakonius, medications and monitors and all that, just in case things went sideways.

Elera spent most of the morning in her lab because that’s where she could breathe. That’s where things made sense. All the social stuff, the party, the danger, it all felt like noise. But here, looking at the cells under the microscope, watching Drakonius’s modified cells actually growing and spreading the corrected DNA like they were supposed to, this was real. This mattered.

She let herself just stare at the screen for a good ten minutes, watching those tiny little victories happening right there in front of her eyes. This is why she’d married him. This is why she’d walked away from Xan and her father and her old life. Because she could do this. She could actually save himn.

After she’d soaked in enough of that good feeling to carry her through whatever hell the evening had planned, she headed upstairs to get ready. The emerald dress was hanging in its bag like it was some kind of secret weapon. But before the dress, before any of that, she had work to do.

She opened the hidden panel in her closet that has her tools. She picked out a few things carefully. A compact that was actually a scanner. A hairpin that could pick up audio from across a room. Some stockings that had conductive thread woven in, it was the type that could block signals if she needed them to. She wasn’t going to this party to fight, but she sure as hell wasn’t going in blind and stupid either.

She was laying all this stuff out on her dressing table, organizing it like she was prepping for surgery, when someone knocked on her door.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and she meant it. “But I don’t know if it really goes with…”

“Touch the center,” he said, interrupting her.

She pressed her finger to the middle of the bracelet. The thing hummed, just barely, and this little holographic display popped up above it, tiny and glowing. It showed a map with two dots, one green, one blue, and a bunch of status readings. SECURE. VITALS NOMINAL. LINK ACTIVE.

“It’s synced to mine,” Drakonius said, and he pulled back his sleeve to show her an identical bracelet on his wrist. “GPS tracking, vital signs, encrypted communication up to five miles out. And if someone gets too close to you, if someone tries something, there’s an electrostatic discharge built in. Enough to drop someone for thirty seconds, give you time to run.”