Chapter 446

“You’re betraying me?!” I screamed, lunging toward the stairs in a desperate bid to reach the cockpit myself.

Two massive Warriors instantly blocked my path, their expressions grim.

“I serve the Alpha King,” Duncan said, his eyes shining with unshed tears as he enforced the cruelest of commands. “My orders are to protect his Mate — even from herself.”

Before I could fight them, a deafening roar shook the tarmac.

A massive, pitch-black Gulfstream G650 bearing no tail numbers — only the callsign Ghost — descended from the stormy sky and touched down heavily on the runway. My heart stopped.

The cabin door opened and the stairs unfolded. A frantic, desperate hope soared in my chest. He’s alive.

Dallas appeared at the top of the stairs, seated in a wheelchair. Azalea stood right behind him.

“Azalea!” I cried out, tears of relief flooding my eyes.

She saw me, her face crumbling with emotion, and took a step forward to run down the stairs.

A low, vibrating growl ripped from Dallas’s throat — a sound of absolute, oppressive control. Azalea’s body snapped rigid. She looked at me, her face twisting in anguish, then slowly bowed her head and stepped back into the shadows behind his chair.

My frantic relief instantly morphed into freezing confusion. Dallas’s storm-gray eyes finally met mine, but they were completely hollow. Dead.

Then a woman stepped out from the cabin.

She was a stunning she-wolf with an exotic, spicy scent that clashed immediately with my moonflower aura. Her name was Yara. She walked up behind Dallas, her hands resting intimately on his broad shoulders as she began to push his wheelchair down the ramp.

They moved past me as though I were nothing but a ghost on the tarmac.

“Dallas?” I whispered, my voice trembling so violently it barely made a sound.

He stopped the wheelchair. He didn’t look at me. “Unfortunately, I survived,” he rasped, his voice sounding as though it had been dragged through gravel and ash.

I stared at the woman’s hands on his shoulders, my chest caving in. “Who is she?” I choked out, using the last ounce of air in my lungs.

Dallas finally turned his head. His eyes were voids of pure ice.

“This is Yara,” he said, every word a silver blade twisting directly into my heart. “She pulled me from the fire — after my Mate left me there to burn.”

Adella

“I didn’t leave you,” I breathed, the biting wind snatching my words before they could even reach him.

Dallas’s storm-gray eyes remained absolute voids of ice. He looked at me not as his Fated Mate, but as a stranger he despised. “You are wolfless, Adella. In a warzone, you are nothing but a liability.”

The word struck me like a physical blow.

Yara’s spicy, exotic scent flared, thick with the arrogance of a victor. She kept her hands intimately on his shoulders, her lips curving into a subtle smirk. “He needs a true Warrior by his side now,” she purred.