Chapter 256
Chapter 256:
“You don’t understand,” Braydon hissed. “Volkov is called the Shark for a reason. He doesn’t take money—he takes assets. Silas is desperate. If you go there alone, you are walking into a trap. I can pay it off, Adella. I can wire the funds to the bank right now. Just turn around. Let me handle this p>
My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles went white. There it was. The savior complex. The need to own my safety so that I would owe him for it.
“I am not your charity case, Braydon,” I said, my voice trembling with suppressed rage. “And I am certainly not yours to save. I don’t need your permission, and I don’t need your money p>
“Adella, please—it’s dangerous p>
“Goodbye, Braydon p>
I hung up and immediately blocked the number, my heart hammering against my ribs. I stared out the window, working to slow my breathing.
He’s lying, I told myself. He’s just trying to scare me back into his arms.
But the name Volkov lingered in my mind like a bad taste.
I shifted in my seat, and a sudden prickle of awareness crawled up the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder. The man in the baseball cap was still there, his head tipped forward, a dark jacket swallowing his frame. He looked asleep, entirely unthreatening. Yet for a moment I felt watched—not in a predatory way, but in the way a shadow clings to your heels.
You’re being paranoid, I chided myself. Dallas has made you jumpy.
An hour later, the train screeched into Mistwood Hollow Station.
𝗣𝘋𝖥𝗌 oո
Stepping onto the platform felt like stepping into a freezer. The air was thick with salt spray and the smell of wet, rotting leaves. The sky was a bruised purple, heavy with unshed rain. The station was deserted, save for a single vehicle idling in the gravel lot below.
A black SUV, mud-splattered and menacing, its windows tinted so dark they looked like voids.
I hesitated at the top of the stairs, gripping the handle of my overnight bag. My instincts—usually dull compared to those of a shifted wolf—were screaming at me to turn back.
The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out.
He was enormous, with a shaved head and a thick neck that disappeared into a stained leather jacket. He didn’t look like a family chauffeur. He looked like a brawler.
But it was the smell that reached me first.
Even from twenty feet away, the wind carried it—a pungent, musky stench of old blood, damp earth, and something feral.
Rogue.
My stomach turned. Silas had sent a Rogue to collect me?
“Adella Everett?” the man grunted, his voice like gravel in a blender. He didn’t bow. He didn’t offer to take my bag. He simply stared at me with flat, dead eyes.
“Yes,” I said, forcing my voice steady. “Silas sent you p>
“Get in.” He jerked his head toward the back seat.
I froze. Every survival instinct I had developed as a wolfless girl in a world of predators told me to run. But run where? The train was gone. The town was miles away. And my mother’s journals were waiting in that manor.
It’s just a ride, I told myself, swallowing the unease rising in my throat. Silas is desperate. He probably hired cheap muscle.