Chapter 25
Chapter 25:
Dallas didn’t run. He didn’t shout. He walked onto the pier with the unhurried certainty of something that has never once needed to rush toward its prey. His footsteps landed like the slow tolling of a funeral bell. The aura radiating from him was so oppressive, so absolute, that Braydon’s legs simply gave out—not by choice, but because the weight of the Alpha King’s power collapsed the space beneath him and forced him to his knees.
Dallas stopped ten feet away. He didn’t look at me. His molten gaze was fixed entirely on Braydon Hyde, and what lived in those eyes was a promise—one that would be neither quick nor merciful to keep.
Adelia
The air on the pier was so heavy it felt like breathing underwater. Dallas stood like something carved from darkness and judgment, his golden eyes burning with an intensity that pinned Braydon to the rotting wooden planks.
Braydon Hyde. My childhood friend. My former fiancé. The boy who had promised me forever—then announced his engagement to Katherine Parrish in front of the entire Pack, leaving me shattered and alone. He was also the son of the people who had taken me in after my parents died, or so they framed it. For ten years, they called it charity. For ten years, I had called it a cage.
Now he was trembling like a leaf in a gale.
The sight of his fear should have satisfied me. Instead, something cold and crystalline hardened in my chest. I was done being the victim. I was done being the prey they had kept penned up for a decade.
I stepped forward. The wood creaked beneath my feet—the only sound in the unnatural silence. Braydon looked up at me, his eyes pleading and pathetic.
“Adelia, please…” he whimpered.
Ten years ago, that voice would have sent me running to his side. Now it turned my stomach. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. He was sorry he had been caught.
𝖱𝘦𝖺𝖽 𝘧𝗿𝘰𝗺 𝘺o𝗎𝘳 𝘱𝗵o𝗇𝗲 𝘰𝗇
I didn’t let him finish. I put every year of pain, every humiliation, every stolen possibility into the swing. My palm connected with his cheek with a crack that rang across the water like a gunshot.
His head snapped sideways. A vivid red handprint bloomed instantly on his pale skin.
“That,” I said, my voice trembling not with fear but with adrenaline, “is for every time you told me I was nothing without you. For every time your mother reminded me I was a charity case—a wolfless stray taken in out of pity. For the ten years I wasted believing I owed you my life because you fed me scraps from your table p>
Braydon stared at me, touching his face as though he couldn’t comprehend that the wolfless girl had dared to strike an Alpha. He didn’t recognize me. The girl who would have begged for his forgiveness was gone.
Before he could recover, Dallas moved. He didn’t speak—he simply tilted his head, a microscopic gesture of command. Instantly, two shadows separated from the treeline. Blackwood Warriors, silent and lethal, seized Braydon by the arms and hauled him upright as though he weighed nothing.
As they dragged him toward the forest, Braydon’s shock curdled into desperate, manic malice. He twisted and screamed back at me, his voice cracking raw.