Chapter 328
He disappeared down the hall, his movements heavy. A short while later, a Beta from the household staff delivered a small bag of essentials — toiletries, a change of clothes. Dallas didn’t return.
I carried the bag to the guest room, a space that smelled of sterile cleaning products and disuse. As I set it on the bed, he lingered in the doorway. His storm-grey eyes searched mine, pleading for a bridge I wasn’t ready to build.
“I need time, Dallas,” I cut him off, turning my back to him. “Please.”
I heard him inhale sharply — a sound of pure pain. “I will wait,” he rasped.
Then came the sound that broke me: the soft click of the door latching shut. It felt final. Like the physical manifestation of a rejection.
For the next two days, I existed in a grey haze. I avoided the common areas, living like a ghost in the tower. But sleep was elusive. Every time I closed my eyes, the image of a boy in an herb shed flashed through my mind. What I had once believed was a romantic twist of fate now felt like a cage. Had I ever been free? Or had I been his to claim since I was five years old?
On the third night, the walls of the guest room began to close in. I needed air.
I wrapped my silk robe tighter around myself and stepped out onto the expansive balcony. The city lights sprawled below like a sea of diamonds, indifferent to my misery.
But I wasn’t alone.
Dallas was leaning against the glass railing, his back to me. A thin plume of smoke curled into the night air. My brow furrowed. I had seen him smoke once before — on the balcony at the lake house, when he thought I was asleep. It was a human vice, something Lycans usually disdained because it dulled the senses. That it appeared now, in the silence of his solitude, said more than words could.
He sensed me before I spoke. He crushed the cigarette against the concrete and made the evidence disappear, but the acrid smell of tobacco, mixed with the ozone of his power, lingered in the air.
“You shouldn’t be out here barefoot,” he said, his voice low and rough, like gravel grinding together. He didn’t turn around.
“Why didn’t you save them?”
The question tore out of me, bypassing all pleasantries. I walked to the railing, standing far enough away that our arms wouldn’t brush, but close enough to see the tension in his jaw.
“You said you watched us,” I continued, my voice rising. “You said you watched my family for years to repay your debt. So where were you, Dallas? Where were you when the Rogues slaughtered my parents? Where was the boy in the woods when I was screaming?”
Dallas gripped the railing so hard the metal groaned beneath his hands. “I was in the North,” he said quietly. “Dealing with a rebellion. I thought you were safe in the Hyde Pack’s territory. Your father was a strong Alpha. I didn’t think—”