Chapter 145
Chapter 145:
Dallas hadn’t simply prepared a room for a mate he had found yesterday. This room felt like something he had been building for a lifetime. The realization sent a shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold. It contradicted everything I thought I knew about the primal, instinct-driven nature of the mate bond. This wasn’t just instinct. This was study. This was obsession.
I couldn’t stay in here. The perfection of it was overwhelming — suffocating in its thoughtfulness.
I slipped back out into the hallway. The thick carpet swallowed my footsteps as I stared at the door across from mine. Darkness seemed to pool around it, heavy and foreboding.
In case you need… anything.
His voice echoed in my mind, rough with a hunger that terrified and thrilled me in equal measure. I shouldn’t go in there. He was a Lycan — a creature of violence and blood — and I was nothing. Wolfless. Breakable.
But my feet moved before my brain could stop them.
I pushed the door open. It was unlocked.
If my room was a shrine to light and art, Dallas’s room was a monk’s cell. The walls were a stark, cold grey. No pictures, no personal mementos, no warmth of any kind. It looked like a showroom in a high-end hotel where no one actually lived.
The only sign of life was the man collapsed on the massive bed.
Dallas lay on top of the grey duvet, fully clothed. One heavy boot was still on his foot; the other lay discarded on the floor. The air was thick with the scent of ozone, rain, and the sharp bite of expensive whiskey.
I crept closer. In sleep, the terrifying intensity of his face had softened, though the lines of exhaustion etched around his eyes remained. He looked like a man who had been fighting a war inside his own head for centuries.
𝗠o𝘳𝘦 𝗇о𝗏𝘦𝗅𝘀 о𝗇.со𝘮
He’s exhausted, I realized, a pang of unexpected sympathy moving through me. Fighting the beast. Fighting for control.
I shouldn’t be here.
My hands trembling slightly, I untied the laces of his remaining boot and slid it off as gently as I could, setting it aside. He didn’t stir. I grabbed the edge of the heavy duvet and pulled it up over his broad shoulders.
“Goodnight, Dallas,” I whispered into the gloom.
I turned to leave, desperate to retreat to the safety of my moonflower-scented haven.
My wrist was seized in a grip of iron.
I gasped and spun around, but couldn’t pull free. Dallas hadn’t opened his eyes. He was still deep in unconsciousness, yet his hand was locked around my wrist with a strength that could snap bone if he chose. It wasn’t aggression. It was desperation.
“Dallas?” I squeaked, tugging uselessly.
His brow furrowed. A low, pained sound rumbled in his chest, and he pulled me — not violently, but with an inexorable force that dragged me off balance. I stumbled, my knees hitting the edge of the mattress.
“Don’t,” he rasped, the word slurring, thick with sleep and something that sounded heartbreakingly like fear. “Don’t… leave… again p>
I froze. Again?