Chapter 428
Through the blinding smoke and the flashing red lights of the approaching emergency vehicles, I saw her. Adella was stumbling out of the wrecked Ferrari, bruised and covered in dust, but alive.
Relief crashed over me, so heavy it nearly brought me to my knees. But before I could reach her, she didn’t run to me. She staggered toward the mangled, smoking ruins of the black GTR.
I forced my ruined leg to move faster, reaching her just as she dropped to her knees beside Braydon’s crushed window. The driver’s side was a horrific tangle of twisted metal. Braydon was pinned, his face a mask of crimson, his legs crushed at a sickening angle.
Adella was trembling, her hands hovering over the shattered glass. “Why?” she choked out, her voice breaking. “Why did you do it?”
Braydon’s eyes fluttered open. Even drowning in his own blood, the arrogant, twisted smirk of the Hyde heir found his lips. He forced his head toward her, his voice a wet, ragged rasp.
“Because you are mine,” he whispered, the words dripping with venomous possessiveness. “Only I get to destroy you. No one else.”
Adella’s entire body went rigid.
It wasn’t a supernatural bond, but I felt it nonetheless — a sickening, icy chain of obligation forged in blood and self-destruction. Braydon wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He was demanding her guilt, a debt she could never repay.
His eyes rolled back and he slumped against the deployed airbag, unconscious.
Adella slowly turned her head and looked up at me. Tears carved clean tracks through the soot on her cheeks. “He saved me, Dallas,” she whispered, her voice hollow, entirely consumed by the weight of what he had just done.
He had won. In one suicidal maneuver, he had built an insurmountable wall between us.
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. I tore my gaze away from my wife and scanned the chaotic perimeter. I was a former Dire Guard commander — I didn’t believe in coincidences. A Ferrari’s brakes didn’t simply vanish on a straightaway.
My eyes locked onto the shadows near the medical tents. Katherine Parrish stood there, illuminated by the alternating pulse of red and blue sirens. There was no shock on her face. No panic. Only a cold, calculating detachment as her thumbs flew across the screen of a burner phone.
Pure, lethal rage replaced the fear in my veins. This wasn’t a racing accident. This was a hit.
I opened the mind-link to my Gamma. Vance. Lock it down. Every mechanic, every crew member, every piece of scrap metal. Find who cut her brake lines. And when you do — bring them to me. Alive.
Yes, Alpha, Vance replied instantly.
Paramedics swarmed the GTR, shouting orders as they deployed the jaws of life to cut Braydon free. They hauled his broken body onto a stretcher and rushed him toward the waiting ambulance.
Adella scrambled to her feet, her eyes wide and frantic, entirely fixed on the stretcher. “I have to go with him,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have to make sure he lives.”