Chapter 443
Braydon leaned casually against the hallway doorframe, a mocking smirk on his face. “He belongs in the dirt and the blood. You belong here. Safe.”
My grief instantly incinerated into a blazing, white-hot fury. I whirled on him. “You are the one who hurts me!” I roared, my voice echoing off the marble walls. “You manipulate, you cage, and you destroy! Dallas is the one who pulls me out of hell every single time!”
Braydon’s smirk faltered, his jaw clenching as my words struck his fragile Alpha ego.
I turned back to the Beta. “Duncan, get me a plane. Now.”
Duncan slowly shook his head. “I can’t. The Alpha King anticipated this. He froze all your personal accounts and grounded the entire Marshall fleet.” He pulled a legal document from his jacket. “He also had our legal team file an emergency injunction, citing your mental breakdown at the gallery. You are legally barred from leaving the country. You are grounded, Luna.”
I stared at the paper, the reality of my gilded cage crashing down around me. Dallas had used his absolute power to build an impenetrable fortress around me, trapping me inside my own safety.
Duncan bowed his head respectfully and let himself out, the heavy door clicking shut behind him.
I stood trembling in the center of the massive living room, utterly isolated.
Braydon slowly closed the distance between us. He looked down at my shaking hands, his eyes gleaming with a twisted, dark obsession. “He chose death over you,” Braydon whispered cruelly. “I chose life. I chose pain. For you.”
I looked up into his eyes, my voice a lethal, freezing calm. “I hate you.”
Braydon smiled — a chilling, genuine expression of victory. “Hate is passion, Addie. As long as you feel something for me, I win.”
He turned and limped toward the kitchen, making himself at home in my prison. I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I turned my gaze to the floor-to-ceiling windows and stared out at the gray city skyline. Dallas thought he could lock me away and die a martyr. But he had forgotten one thing. He had made me a Queen — and a Queen never bows to a cage.
I turned away from the windows, leaving Braydon to his arrogant delusions in the living room, and marched straight into Dallas’s study, locking the heavy oak doors behind me. The room still carried the lingering scent of storm and cedar — a painful reminder of the mate who had just thrown his life away for me.
Before I could even catch my breath, the secure Pack comms console on the mahogany desk blinked red. I tapped the receiver.
Clarissa Vance’s voice slithered through the speaker, dripping with venomous glee. “Enjoying the view from the gilded cage, little wolfless? I hear the King has flown. Guess he finally got tired of his broken —”
I didn’t scream. The agonizing cocktail of sedatives and my severed mate-bond instantly hardened into pure, lethal ice. I activated the holo-comms and patched in the Marshall Group’s Chief Financial Officer.