Chapter 503

“You wolfless bitch!” he roared, his eyes bleeding into a feral, glowing gold. Blinded by rage, he snatched a heavy, unopened champagne bottle from a decorative side table and raised it like a club to strike me down.

Before he could swing, the black glass wall behind me hissed. A hidden panel slid open silently.

The air that rushed out was wrong—tainted with something metallic and rotting, undercut by the faint, familiar presence of a storm. Dallas stood in the doorway. He was a ghost of the King I knew. His ashen skin was slick with cold sweat, and his massive frame trembled so violently that he had to lean heavily against the doorframe and the shoulder of his Beta, Duncan Whitaker, just to stay upright.

But his eyes—they were pitch black. And the force of his presence crashed into the corridor like a tidal wave. The air pressure plummeted.

“Kneel.”

The command ripped from Dallas’s throat. It wasn’t loud, but it carried a lethal, absolute authority that bowed the very architecture around us. Hunter gasped, the champagne bottle slipping from his fingers to shatter on the floor as his knees violently slammed into the carpet, forced into submission by the King’s will.

Without missing a beat, Duncan stepped forward, raising a taser. Two sharp pops echoed, and the electric prongs embedded themselves deep into Hunter’s chest. The sleazy Alpha convulsed violently before collapsing face-first onto the glass shards, completely incapacitated.

The threat was gone, but the terrifying silence that followed was worse.

Dallas’s black eyes found mine. The feral fury in them shattered, instantly replaced by profound, unbearable agony. He raised a shaking hand, as if trying to warn me to stay back, but the sheer effort of issuing the Command had cost him his last drop of life force.

His knees buckled.

“Dallas!” I screamed, lunging forward. I threw my arms around his waist just as he pitched forward, using my own body to break his fall. We crashed hard onto the thick crimson carpet.

He was burning alive. The heat radiating from his skin was terrifying, unnatural. Dark blood began to stream from his nose, dripping onto the pristine white collar of his shirt.

“Dallas, stay with me. Please,” I begged, my hands trembling as I cradled his heavy head in my lap, pressing my palms against his feverish cheeks. “Look at me!”

His eyelids fluttered. When he looked up at me, his eyes were his own again—a beautiful, fading storm-gray. Stripped of all the coldness, all the lies, only a devastating vulnerability remained. He reached up, his bloody fingers weakly brushing against my jaw.

“I tried…” he rasped, his voice a broken, remorseful whisper that tore straight through my soul. “I tried… to stay away from you.”

His hand went slack, falling to the carpet as his eyes rolled back. His massive body went entirely limp in my arms.

“No! Dallas, no!” I sobbed, clutching him to my chest.