Chapter 409
He chuckled — a dark, grating sound that made my skin crawl. “Oh, I’m sure the Lycan King is throwing quite the tantrum. But Suki was just a little loyalty test. A minor distraction. And Dallas passed, didn’t he? He chose you.”
“Don’t ever contact me again,” I warned, my finger hovering over the end-call button.
“Does he love you, Adella?” Braydon’s voice sharpened, cutting through my defenses like a silver blade. “Or does he just love the daughter of Elara Everett?”
My breath hitched. My mother’s name landed like a physical blow to my chest.
“Ask him,” Braydon whispered, his tone dripping with venomous delight. “Ask your perfect, devoted mate about Project Nightingale. Ask him what his sweet half-sister, Cassia, is really doing for him behind your back.”
The line went dead.
I stood frozen in the sterile hallway, the phone slipping from my trembling fingers. Nightingale. It was a secret word — a whispered promise between Dallas and me in the dark. How did Braydon know it?
A cold, suffocating seed of doubt took root in my chest. I looked through the glass window at Dallas, his chest rising and falling peacefully. I loved him with every fiber of my being — but the shadows of his secrets were suddenly looming large over everything we had built.
When he opened his eyes, there could be no more hiding.
Adelia
The storm raging outside the reinforced glass of the VIP suite was a chaotic swirl of charcoal and bleeding gray, rain lashing against the windows like handfuls of shattered stone. Yet the tempest inside Room 2201 was infinitely more suffocating. The only rhythm anchoring me to reality was the sterile beep of Dallas’s cardiac monitor.
I sat stiffly in the plastic chair beside his bed. He was submerged in a heavy, chemically induced sleep, his broad chest rising and falling unevenly beneath layers of gauze. His left leg was elevated in a brutal-looking metal traction device, the surgical pins catching the dim light.
I stared at his pale, exhausted face, but my mind was miles away, poisoned by the phone call I had received minutes earlier.
“Ask him about Project Nightingale.” Braydon’s oily, venomous voice echoed relentlessly in my skull.
Nightingale. It was our word — a whispered promise traded in the dark sanctity of the night. The realization that Braydon knew our most intimate secret felt like a violation. I wanted to dismiss it as crude manipulation, but the seed of doubt had already buried its roots deep in my chest. I made a silent vow: the moment Dallas opened his eyes, the shadows between us would be banished. No more secrets.
Suddenly, the rhythmic hum of the monitor fractured into a frantic, staccato warning.
Dallas’s head snapped to the side, thrashing against the pillow. A sheen of cold sweat broke out across his pallid skin. A low, jagged growl tore from his throat — a sound of pure, unadulterated agony that belonged to Ragnar, his trapped inner beast.
“Run,” Dallas rasped, his eyes squeezed shut against a nightmare I couldn’t see. “Adella, run!”
“Dallas, wake up. You’re safe,” I urged, leaning over the bed rails.