Chapter 380
Beside me, Braydon didn’t stand. I caught the microscopic twitch of his lips — a ghost of a smirk.
“A touching family reunion,” Dallas said, his voice a lethal, silken purr that vibrated against my bones.
“Dallas, it’s not what it looks like—”
The heavy double doors of the ICU swung open. A doctor stepped out, his expression grim. “Miss Everett? Victoria is crashing. She’s asking for you. You need to come now.”
Panic seized my throat. I looked back at Dallas, my eyes pleading. “Please. Wait for me. Just let me say goodbye.”
Dallas looked at me, then at Braydon, his jaw ticking. The betrayal in his black eyes landed like a physical blow. “Go play the dutiful daughter, Adella. The air in here makes me sick.”
He turned on his heel. I stood paralyzed — pulled forward by the doctor’s urgency and backward by the sight of Dallas walking away — as the metal elevator doors slid shut, sealing him away like a tomb.
Dallas POV
The crystal glass shattered against the mahogany wall of my office, amber liquid bleeding into the carpet. It wasn’t enough. The fire in my veins demanded blood.
“She chose him,” I projected through the mind-link, my mental voice ragged.
My Beta’s response was infuriatingly calm. “She chose her duty to a dying Luna, my King. It is the old way. You know this.”
“I saw his hands on her,” Ragnar roared in my skull, pacing violently against his mental cage. “He touched what is ours.”
I gripped the edge of my desk, staring blindly at the city lights below. I just needed her to reach out. One tug on the bond. One whisper in my mind to tell me I was a fool. I waited. The minutes bled into an hour.
Nothing. The silence from her end of the bond was absolute.
“She is with him,” Ragnar snarled, the beast overwhelming my senses. “In their den.”
I closed my eyes and let the darkness swallow me whole.
Adelia POV
It was three in the morning. The exhaustion in my bones was a physical weight, dragging me under.
After hours of sitting at Victoria’s bedside watching her cling to life, Braydon had gently steered me out of the hospital. “Hyde Manor is five minutes away,” he had said, his voice thick with manufactured concern. “There’s a freak storm over the city. Cell towers are down. You can’t even call a cab, Addie. Just sleep.”
I was too drained to fight. Too drained to summon the energy to push through the mental fog and open the mind-link to Dallas. Just a few hours, I promised myself, staring at the familiar, suffocating walls of my old guest room at Hyde Manor. Then I’ll explain everything.
I collapsed onto the mattress, and the darkness claimed me instantly.
In the dim hallway outside my closed door, Braydon’s sorrowful mask melted away. He crouched by the baseboard and plugged a small black device into the electrical outlet. A tiny red light blinked to life — a military-grade signal jammer.