Chapter 396
Liam didn’t blink. He pushed a heavy ceramic mug across the table, steam billowing from the pitch-black liquid. “Drink,” he ordered, his voice stripped of its usual warmth. “It’s a long night when you’re mourning the king you killed.”
He was testing me. He wanted to see if the guilt would break me.
Maintaining unbroken eye contact, I wrapped my hands around the mug and took a deep, punishing swallow. The scalding coffee burned my throat, but I didn’t flinch. The physical pain was nothing compared to the agony of knowing our bond had been shattered by lies.
“I didn’t kill him,” I rasped, my eyes blazing with a Luna’s defiance.
Liam studied the fire in my gaze. Slowly, the hostility in his posture cracked. He reached into his coat, pulled out his phone, and slid it across the table.
“This is what broke him,” he said quietly.
I looked at the screen, and the diner spun around me. It was a photograph taken in the dead, withered gardens of the Hyde estate. In the center of the frame, a woman wearing my exact cashmere nightgown — my exact hair, my exact profile — was passionately kissing Braydon.
The hooded woman from the café. Suki.
“That’s not me,” I breathed, a lethal, icy rage settling into my bones.
“I know,” Liam replied. He reached over and zoomed in on the photo, pointing to the woman’s smooth left wrist. Then he looked pointedly at mine.
I turned my wrist over, exposing the faint white childhood scar near my pulse point.
“Dallas got drunk in my office a few months ago,” Liam murmured, a sad smile touching his lips. “He talked about that scar for twenty minutes. Called it the most perfect flaw on the most perfect woman.” He paused. “That’s how I knew Braydon hired a double.”
Relief crashed over me so hard I almost choked on it. I wasn’t fighting alone anymore.
“His inner wolf, Ragnar, is rejecting all medical treatment,” Liam warned, his tone turning strictly professional. “The trauma of the betrayal is tearing him apart from the inside. Duncan and Vance are too blinded by Braydon’s lies to see the truth. If you don’t reach him, he will die.”
“Tell me how to get in.”
Liam pulled a folded piece of paper from his journal. “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. The loading dock behind the hospital. I’ll have a nurse’s uniform and forged consent forms waiting for you.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to barely a whisper. “I’ll trigger a false medical alert to pull Duncan and Vance away from the ICU doors. You’ll have exactly five minutes to take the freight elevator to room 2201. But be careful, Adella. Braydon has a spy on the inside — Nurse Anya. If she sees you, the trap closes.”
Adelia POV
The morning air was thick with the bitter aftermath of the storm. The loading dock behind the Blackwood Medical Center was a bleak stretch of wet concrete, smelling faintly of damp asphalt, industrial bleach, and the rotting contents of the massive green dumpsters lining the brick wall.
.