Chapter 30
Chapter 30:
The fear that had paralyzed me cracked apart. What replaced it was more confusing—a surge of concern that made no logical sense. He wasn’t attacking me. He was fighting to protect me from himself.
“Dallas?” I took a hesitant step forward.
He looked up. His face was pale, the molten glow in his eyes flickering—warring with something darker and more controlled beneath. He looked wrecked. He looked, for the first time since I had known him, entirely human.
“Don’t run,” he rasped, extending one trembling hand toward me. It was phrased as a command, but it landed like a plea. “Adelia. Stay with me. Help me cage him p>
𝗡𝘦𝘸 с𝘩а𝘱𝘁𝗲𝘳𝗌 𝗲𝘃е𝗋𝘆 wе𝖾𝗸 oո.со𝗆
Every instinct I had screamed at me to unlock the door and flee into the storm. But my feet refused. Seeing him like this—broken and desperate, stripped of the cold armor he wore like a second skin—pulled at something deep inside me that I couldn’t name and couldn’t reason away.
“How?” I asked, my voice barely a sound.
“Just come here p>
I moved before I could stop myself, drawn forward by a force that had nothing to do with logic.
The moment I was within reach, he didn’t simply take my hand.
He lunged.
With a groan of pure effort, he hauled himself upright and stumbled toward the bed, collapsing onto the mattress like a felled tree. Before I could react, his arm shot out and hooked around my waist like a steel band.
“Dallas!” I gasped as he pulled me down.
I fell onto the soft duvet, and then he was around me—not on top of me, but curved behind me, his massive frame folding around my back and drawing me flush against his chest. His legs tangled with mine, anchoring me in place. I was encased in the solid, radiating heat of him with nowhere to go.
“Your scent,” he murmured, pressing his face into the crook of my neck. He inhaled slowly, a full-body shudder moving through him. “It’s the only thing that quiets him. Just for tonight—let me breathe you p>
I lay rigid in his arms, my heart hammering. I should have been fighting. I should have been screaming. But as his nose brushed the sensitive skin beneath my ear, a jolt of electricity—hot, clean, and deeply unwelcome—shot straight down my spine.
It was nothing like the revulsion I felt when Braydon touched me. When Braydon grabbed my arm, I felt reduced to an object. I felt dirty.
But this—
Dallas’s grip was iron, possessive, edging toward painful—and yet I felt no threat in it. What I felt, against every rational instinct I possessed, was something that could only be described as anchored.
His breathing, ragged against my skin, began to slow. The stone-hard tension in his muscles loosened, degree by degree. His scent filled my lungs—rain-soaked earth, cedar, and the electric charge of the storm that clung to him—and my head swam with it. It was intoxicating. It was, against all reason, the smell of safety.
He needs me, a quiet, treacherous voice murmured somewhere beneath my thoughts. I am the only thing keeping the beast at bay.