Chapter 298

Chapter 298:

“Let him come,” Dallas murmured, leaning in until his forehead rested against mine. His breath fanned across my lips, warm and intoxicating. “Let him try. He is nothing but a bad memory fading in the sun. He cannot touch you here p>

He kissed me then — slow, deep, and claiming. It wasn’t a kiss of lust but of reassurance, a seal on a promise. His lips moved against mine with a possessive rhythm that silenced the screaming in my head. Mine, his beast purred into my mind, the sound wrapping around my frayed nerves like a bandage.

“Here, you are safe,” he whispered against my mouth, pulling back just enough to look into my soul. “Here, you are mine. No ghosts can touch you, little wolf p>

The knot of anxiety in my chest finally began to loosen, dissolved by his conviction. I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him.

The exhaustion came crashing down then, a heavy, dark tide. I leaned into him, burying my face in the crook of his neck and inhaling the scent of my mate. My eyes fluttered shut, the warmth of the fire and the strength of his arms lulling me into a darkness that finally felt peaceful.

As I drifted off, Dallas’s heartbeat thudded against my ear — steady and strong. I let myself fall into the abyss of sleep, trusting him to keep the ghosts at bay.

I didn’t know then that some ghosts don’t need the dark to haunt you. They simply wait for you to close your eyes.

The first thing I registered was the silence. It wasn’t the heavy, suffocating silence of the attic in the Hyde estate — it was a living, breathing stillness. Sunlight, pale and watery like diluted gold, spilled across the floorboards and illuminated dust motes dancing in the air.

𝗝оіn о𝗎r 𝗰𝗈𝗆𝘮𝗎n𝘪t𝗒 о𝗇.сo𝘮

I was warm. Impossibly warm.

I shifted slightly, realizing I was draped across a body as solid as the mountain bedrock beneath the cabin. Dallas. His breathing was a slow, rhythmic tide that rose and fell beneath my cheek. The scent of him — rain-soaked earth and deep cedar — wrapped around me like a fortress against the lingering nightmares.

For a moment, I allowed myself to simply exist in the peace of it. But then my gaze drifted to his arm, thrown protectively over my waist.

My breath hitched.

There, on his muscular forearm just below the elbow, was a patch of white gauze stained with a faint, yellowish herbal paste. The memory of the previous night crashed into me with the force of a physical blow. The screaming. The shaking. The way my reality had fractured under the weight of the truth about my parents. I remembered clinging to him, drowning in panic, my instincts overtaking everything. I had bitten him. Hard.

I scrambled backward, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The movement woke him instantly.

Dallas’s eyes snapped open. For a fraction of a second they burned the glowing amber of his Lycan — alert and dangerous — before softening into the melted gold of the man I loved.