Chapter 483
Vance Decker POV
The heavy silence of the corridor was broken only by the dripping of spilled coffee. I stared at the mess on the floor, Adella’s words cutting deeper than any silver blade. She was right. We had destroyed her.
But my immediate duty wasn’t to my own guilt. It was to my Alpha.
I pushed the door to Suite 1 open, dread pooling cold and heavy in my gut. The room was eerily quiet. The heart monitor wasn’t beeping — it had been ripped from the wall.
“Alpha?” I called out, stepping inside.
I found him on the floor, kneeling over the red biohazard bin. Dallas’s massive frame was convulsing violently. He was coughing — a wet, tearing sound — and spitting thick, pink froth into the plastic container. Pulmonary edema. His lungs were filling completely with fluid. The silver rot had reached its catastrophic climax.
Panic, raw and primal, seized my chest. I reached for my comms and simultaneously opened a frantic mind-link to Dr. Alistair Vance to call a Code Red.
Before the link could connect, a bloodstained hand shot out and clamped around my wrist with terrifying, desperate strength.
Dallas looked up at me. His storm-gray irises were entirely swallowed by the pure, bottomless black of his dying Lycan. His skin was ashen, his lips tinted a deadly, oxygen-starved blue.
He couldn’t speak, but his fractured, agonizing thoughts bled into my mind through the link.
No — the Claws — they’re watching — she’s not safe if they know — Vance — back door —
“Dallas, you are dying!” I yelled, dropping to my knees to support his collapsing weight. “I have to get Alistair!”
“Back door,” he commanded, the sheer, crushing weight of his Alpha’s Command forcing my wolf into absolute submission even as his body failed.
His eyes rolled back. The iron grip on my wrist went entirely slack, and the Alpha King of the Blackwood Pack went limp in my arms.
I was torn between the desperate need to save his life and the absolute oath I had sworn to obey him. Cursing the Moon Goddess, I hauled his massive, unconscious body over my shoulder, bypassed the medical alarms, and carried him toward the clinic’s hidden rear exit — praying I wasn’t carrying a corpse.
Adella POV
The underground archives of the university’s history department smelled of old parchment, dust, and quiet isolation — the exact opposite of the chaotic, blood-soaked world I had just escaped.
I sat across from Professor Albright, a bespectacled human who had no idea what a Lycan was. I signed my name at the bottom of the employment contract. Junior Restoration Specialist. It was a fraction of what I had made at S&D Design, but it was mine. A fresh start.
As I stepped out of the archives and into the crisp morning air of the campus, my burner phone vibrated in my pocket.
I didn’t recognize the number, but the heavy, arrogant voice on the other end was unmistakable.
“A rough night, I hear,” Anson Fowler purred, his tone dripping with a predatory knowingness that made my blood run cold.
“How did you get this number, Anson?” I demanded, my spine stiffening.