Chapter 374
But as I walked toward him, I saw Dallas’s nostrils flare. His jaw clenched, a muscle ticking dangerously in his cheek. The gold in his irises swirled and consumed the brown, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
I hadn’t realized, until that moment, that I had brought back the scent of another male’s desperation — a mark on his possession that no Lycan would tolerate.
Dallas
The moment she crossed the threshold, the air in the room curdled.
It wasn’t just the damp, rotting smell of the garden clinging to her clothes. It was him. That sour, pathetic stench of a broken Alpha, coating her skin like a layer of grease — an invisible film that screamed of another male’s touch.
Kill him, Ragnar roared in the back of my mind, his voice a jagged tear through my composure. He touched what is ours. Rip his throat out. Paint the walls with him.
My jaw clenched so hard I thought a tooth might crack. The gold in my vision bled outward, threatening to consume the brown entirely. I could see the ghost of Braydon Hyde’s hands on her arms, the lingering warmth of his chest against hers. It was an insult. A violation.
“It’s done,” Adella said, exhaling as if she had just set down a heavy load.
She didn’t realize she had picked up a heavier one.
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. If I opened my mouth, a command to slaughter the entire Hyde lineage would spill out. Instead, I crossed the distance between us in two strides and gripped her hand — my fingers pressing into her palm, perhaps too hard, but I needed the tactile proof that she was mine.
“We are leaving,” I ground out, my voice like gravel in a crusher.
I didn’t offer a polite nod to the staff. I pulled her out of that mausoleum of a house and into the waiting black SUV.
“Drive,” I ordered the driver, the single word cracking like a whip. “Partition up.”
The black glass slid shut with a mechanical hiss, sealing us in a leather-bound box. The driver, sensing the lethal energy radiating off me, merged onto the highway and floored it.
Silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating. I stared straight ahead, watching the speedometer climb past a hundred. My nostrils flared, inhaling the confined air. The scent was stronger here. Desperation. Fear. Braydon.
“Twelve seconds,” I said, my voice devoid of inflection.
Adella turned to look at me. “What?”
“You let him hold you for twelve seconds.” I turned my head slowly, pinning her with a gaze that was more beast than man. “I counted.”
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t apologize. Instead, I saw a spark of something dangerous ignite in her eyes. She unbuckled her seatbelt — the click deafening in the quiet cabin.
She slid across the leather seat until her thigh pressed against mine. The heat of her body was a siren song, but the smell of him still clung to her, taunting me. She leaned close, her lips brushing the shell of my ear.