Instead of compliance, Thorne was met with a silence so absolute, so dense, it felt like a physical weight pressing down on his shoulders. Elara’s expression did not shift. Her dark eyes, deep and entirely devoid of fear, bore into him with the terrifying intensity of a judge looking down upon a condemned man.
Slowly, deliberately, Elara shifted her weight. She raised her left hand, the black lace of her glove contrasting sharply against the pale silver of her teacup, and pointed a single finger downward, directly at Thorne’s heavy leather boots.
"Fix your tone," Elara commanded. Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It possessed a low, resonant, and icy authority that resonated deep within the chest. "You're standing on my property, officer."
Thorne blinked, momentarily derailed. No one spoke to him this way. In his world, the leather coat and the brass badge were absolute. For a civilian—let alone a woman he had already deemed beneath him—to speak to him with such unyielding command was a direct assault on his fragile ego. The veins in his thick neck bulged against his collar. The flush in his face deepened to a violent, angry purple.
Driven by a blinding surge of fury, Thorne abandoned whatever remaining fragments of protocol he possessed. He stomped up the obsidian steps, his heavy boots leaving scuff marks on the pristine stone. He invaded her personal space, the smell of stale coffee, old leather, and aggressive malice rolling off him in waves.