Chapter 315
Chapter 315:
I shook my head, unable to speak. My heart was pounding against my ribs — but not from the crash. Not anymore.
I stared at the gun in his hand. Wolves didn’t use guns. We used teeth, claws, and the strength the Moon Goddess gave us. Guns were for humans. For cowards. Or for soldiers.
“You didn’t shift,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat.
“He had the high ground and silver,” Dallas replied flatly, re-holstering the weapon as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Shifting would have been suicide. I neutralized the threat p>
Neutralized.
D𝘰𝘸𝗇l𝗼a𝖽 P𝘋𝘍𝘴 𝖿𝗿e𝗲 о𝗻
The word hung in the air, cold and sterile.
I looked at his face. The Lycan King was there, yes. The possessive, passionate man who had kissed me moments ago was there. But beneath it, I saw something else — a ghost from a life he had never mentioned. A secret forged in steel and discipline that had nothing to do with our world.
“Who taught you to shoot like that?” I asked, my voice trembling.
Dallas’s jaw tightened. He reached out and wiped a smudge of dirt from my cheek, his touch gentle again, but his eyes carefully guarded.
“We need to move, Adella,” he deflected, pulling me to my feet. “He wasn’t working alone. We need to get to safety p>
He pulled me close, his scent wrapping around me — cedar, ozone, and now the sharp tang of gunpowder. As we began to climb the embankment away from the wreckage, a chill settled in my bones that had nothing to do with the night air.
I had just realized that I didn’t fully know the man I had fallen in love with. And that terrified me more than the silver ever could.
Adella
Consciousness returned in fragments, sharp and stinging like shattered glass.
The smell of pine and rain was gone, replaced by the sterile, biting scent of antiseptic and latex. I blinked, the harsh fluorescent lights of the Blackwood Pack’s medical center burning my retinas. My left arm felt heavy, encased in a black fiberglass cast that throbbed in time with my heartbeat.
“You’re awake p>
The voice was low, vibrating through the room like the rumble of a distant earthquake. Dallas stood by the window, his silhouette cutting through the artificial light. A stark white bandage was taped to his forehead — a jarring contrast against his tan skin, the only sign he had been in a crash that should have killed us both.
His obsidian eyes were devoid of warmth. Ragnar, his Lycan beast, was pacing just beneath his skin, filling the room with an aura of suffocating pressure.
“The shooter?” I rasped, my throat dry.
“Alive. For now,” Dallas said, moving to my bedside. He didn’t touch me, as if he were afraid his own rage might shatter me.
The door slid open and Vance Decker, Dallas’s Gamma, stepped in. He looked grim, holding a tablet with white-knuckled tension.
“Report,” Dallas commanded. He didn’t use the mind-link. He wanted me to hear this.