69novels Chapter 412: Who She Was With
Chapter 412: Who She Was With
Meeting two of the three men in this apartment was one thing. To discover that they might own it... was another.
Well. Actually, that made sense.
Thalia and Gregor had already met Oathran. They knew he was a dragon. Whatever he did for money, he couldn’t be broke, right? Dragons are the guardians of the world!
The McKing gig was clearly a sham. Or a hobby. Or a cosplay...? You know what, it could be some incomprehensible dragon thing that mortals were not meant to understand and they’d accept it. Again, a being like that wouldn’t be broke. Of course he would live well.
The other two men must simply be his roommates. Friends, perhaps. Brothers-in-arms. They were probably relying on the dragon’s wealth to subsidize their living situation. Were they the two other men who...? If that bitch Ruby Vaiva’s testimony was true...?
Thalia and Gregor had just settled on these assumptions when the introductions began.
Oathran stepped forward first, his eyes calm and welcoming. "You remember Thalia and Gregor, yes? They brought Cecilia’s belongings."
The two men nodded and smiled. The black-haired one, the wolf, with his black eyes and his steady presence, extended his hand toward Thalia. "Arkai Dawnoro. Nice to meet you properly."
Thalia’s and Gregor’s brain stopped working.
Arkai Dawnoro. The name hit them like a freight train. Aro Industry. The largest private infrastructure and containment corporation in the world with government contracts on every continent. It was the company that had single-handedly revolutionized the purification chamber system!
Also, the company whose owner was famously reclusive, private, and never photographed—that Arkai Dawnoro?!
The golden-haired one, the lion, with his sunny smile walked over. "Eastiel Edengold. Thanks for bringing Princess’s things. You truly are her best allies."
Edengold. The name hit them again like a second freight train, right on the heels of the first. The Edengold family. Old money—no, ancient money!
The kind of money that didn’t make headlines because it owned the headlines, and was measured not in billions but in centuries of accumulated power and influence.
Eastiel Edengold, the eldest son, the one who had famously walked away from the family business to "do his own thing", was living in this apartment!
Thalia turned to Gregor. Gregor turned to Thalia. Their eyes met in the silent communion of two people who had just realized that every single assumption they had made about this situation was wrong.
Could it possibly be—that the dragon was the poorest one here?
No. No, that wasn’t right either. The dragon was a dragon. His wealth was probably measured in hoarded gold and ancient artifacts and the intergenerational wealth that made human economics look like pocket change.
Which meant—
Their Madam. The astrophysicist and the billionaire’s divorcee... was the poorest one here.
They didn’t know they’d go out today to discover that their employer’s new roommates were, collectively, worth more than the GDP of several small nations.
***
Usually, CCTVs were installed only in certain places. The logic was simple though. It was usually dictated entirely by the priorities of the owner of the establishment.
For example, in the night club, you placed cameras where the money was. The cash registers, the back offices where the nightly take was counted and stored, the locked rooms where the safes sat bolted to the floor.
You placed cameras where theft was most likely to occur. The stockrooms, the employee entrances, the shadowed corridors where someone might slip away with a bottle of top-shelf liquor tucked under their jacket.
You placed cameras to track routes, the path a thief would take from the scene of the crime to the exit, the path a suspicious employee might walk when they thought no one was watching, or the path money traveled from the customer’s hand to the vault.
Thus, a CCTV would rarely capture the entire dance floor. What was the point?
The dance floor was chaos. It was bodies and motion and flashing lights, a churning sea of people that no camera could parse into useful evidence.
Theft did happen on the dance floor. But it was not the business of the establishment. Money did not change hands on the dance floor either. The main thing that happened on the dance floor was dancing, and dancing was not a liability.
But this club was different.
The owner, a shrewd, business-minded man who had built his empire on the twin pillars of general exclusivity and viral marketing, had insisted on full dance floor coverage.
Every corner. Every angle. Every square meter of writhing, ecstatic humanity captured in high definition from multiple cameras mounted in the ceiling.
He owned a streaming account, you see. A popular one. Every night, he broadcast the dance floor live to hundreds of thousands of viewers who tuned in to watch strangers lose themselves in the music.
"Well, I often invited local celebrity DJs," he would explain, if he was questioned about the unusual camera arrangement. "It racked up views! To the millions!"
And now, Arzhen Vasiliev had gotten his hands on the recordings from that night.
His men had scoured hours of tape, cutting and compiling, isolating every frame where that woman appeared. And they had delivered the edited footage to him on a secure tablet.
Now, alone in his study with the curtains drawn and the door locked, Arzhen pressed play.
He saw her in the back first. She was covered up in a long, dark trenchcoat that fell past her knees, its collar turned up, its fabric swallowing her lean frame.
Her blonde hair fell loose around her shoulders. Her face, pale as moonlight, was the only thing visible. It was the only confirmation that it was really her.
She was dancing. Gently. Alone. Her movements were small and quiet, her body swaying to the music in a self-contained grace, trying not to attract attention.
She looked so pale. Almost sick.
And every time the spinning lights swept over her, red, blue, gold, white, she would catch the glow and hold it, her skin illuminated like something holy, like a figure in a stained-glass window.
Men started to surround her. Arzhen watched them drift toward her like moths toward a flame, their bodies angling in her direction, their drinks held loosely in their hands.
They offered her their glasses, half-empty cocktails, bottles of beer, shots of something dark and potent, and she accepted.
She drank. She danced. She moved from partner to partner, men and women both, her body gradually picking up momentum, her feet carrying her deeper into the crowd. Toward the center of the dance floor.
She was drinking more now. He could see it in the way her movements loosened, the way her head tilted back, the way her smile spread across her pale face like the sun breaking through clouds.
She laughed.
Too bad, though, the CCTV footage only had low-quality audio. The bass of the music drowned out everything else, reducing human voices to faint, tinny whispers.
He had never seen her laugh like that. Apparently, he would never hear the sound.
Then the five men appeared.
They were dressed in flashy clothes. Shimmering shirts, designer jackets... You know, peacocking attire that screamed money and status. It gave them this confidence. Like they were people who were used to getting what they wanted.
For a while, they seemed gentle. They danced, they smiled, they moved through the crowd of women easily, charmingly like hunters who knew exactly how to approach their prey.
It was not clear when it changed.
The footage was grainy at the edges, the lights disorienting, the motion constant.
But at some point, the men’s touches became too intimate. Their hands lingered too long. Their bodies pressed too close.
Arzhen watched one of them reach for a woman who was not Cecilia, watched her try to pull away.
And then he saw Cecilia. She had raised her arm over her body like a shield, her elbow angled to keep distance between herself and the man who was leaning toward her.
Her face was still glowing under the lights, but had lost its smile. She was trying to back away. But she was pursued.
That was when the three men appeared.
Two in dark overalls. One in a bright red uniform with a yellow logo emblazoned on the chest.
Arzhen remembered Ruby’s words.
"I even saw one of them wearing a McKing uniform. Kissing her. Getting down on her. The other two were wearing dark worker’s overalls. There were three of them, Arzhen... On her. At the same time."