Chapter 417
“They won’t physically attack me in public,” she countered smoothly, her spine rigid. “They fight with words and rumors. If we don’t show our faces, we hand Malcolm the victory. You know I’m right.”
Logic warred violently with my Lycan instincts. She was right. But the thought of the fragile woman I loved standing as my shield while I rotted in this room made my blood boil. I gave a stiff, reluctant nod, the bitter taste of inadequacy heavy on my tongue.
“They aren’t just trying to parade Cassia,” I said, the paranoia I had been harboring finally spilling over. “Seraphina and Braydon are looking for ammunition. They want to prove I’m mentally unfit to rule.”
Adella frowned, her strategic façade slipping into genuine concern. “How?”
“My medical files from my time as a Dire Guard commander,” I confessed, the words tasting like ash. “They are brutally honest — they detail Ragnar’s volatility, the PTSD, the violent episodes during the rogue purges. If the Elders read that I have a history of homicidal loss of control, I’m done. They will lock me in a cage.”
“Where are they?”
“In a physical safe in Liam Barber’s office at the medical center. He’s the only one with the key.”
“Liam is loyal,” she said immediately. “He’s my friend.”
“Loyalty has limits,” I sneered, my paranoia painting shadows in every corner. “Liam has a pressure point — a botched surgery years ago, something that would cost him his license and exile him from the Pack. Seraphina excels at blackmail. If she or Braydon squeeze him hard enough…”
I trailed off, the implication hanging heavy in the sterile air. The foundation of my reign was resting on a doctor’s fragile career.
The silence that followed was suffocating. I had just laid my throat bare to her, exposing the deepest, most fatal cracks in my armor. The vulnerability made my skin crawl. I needed control. I needed to rebuild the wall between us before she saw just how broken I truly was.
I forced my expression into a mask of pure ice and looked her dead in the eye. “Take Azalea with you to the gala. She knows the players. She knows who to watch.”
I grabbed the wheels of my chair and turned my back to her, staring out at the glittering city I was failing to hold. “Go,” I commanded, my voice stripped of all affection, reducing everything between us to a mere political directive. “Do your duty to the Pack.”
Behind me, the air went impossibly still.
“I know my duty,” Adella replied, her voice tight and brittle.
The soft click of her bedroom door left me alone in the dark.
Lena
My eyes burned, feeling as though they were coated in crushed glass.
For forty-eight hours, I had been trapped in the S&D Design Restoration Wing of Marshall Tower, surviving on stale coffee and sheer willpower.
The open-layout floor was usually a sanctuary of quiet focus, but today the air in my glass-walled suite was heavy with ozone and the faint, lingering aroma of old parchment.