Chapter 505
Hunter sobbed, cradling his mangled hand. “My Pack… you’ll destroy my Pack.”
Vance drew a silver blade, pressing it to Hunter’s throat. “Sign with your left. All your personal assets to the Blackwood Orphan Fund, and a full confession of your collusion with Rogues and the silver dust trade. Or you don’t leave this room.”
Trembling under the threat of death, Hunter scrawled his name.
I severed the connection as a violent cough ripped through my chest. I snatched a white handkerchief from the bedside table and pressed it to my mouth. When I pulled it away, the linen was soaked in dark, blackish blood. I quickly shoved it under my pillow before Dr. Vance could turn around.
Adella POV
The morning sun offered no warmth in the sterile safe house apartment near the university. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the television. The RogueNet news anchor was practically vibrating with the breaking story: Alpha Hunter Lloyd had been found critically injured, his personal assets entirely liquidated, his reputation destroyed by a leaked confession of treason.
A dark, twisted sense of safety washed over me, warring with absolute terror. Dallas had done this. Even while dying, he had annihilated the man who had touched me.
The encrypted burner phone on the nightstand buzzed. I snatched it up. “Dallas?”
“Hardly,” a sharp, aristocratic voice replied. Eleanor “Gigi” Marshall.
“Gigi… the news. We rejected each other. Why would he do this?”
“Do not mistake the actions of a caged Lycan for love, child,” Gigi interrupted, her tone surgical and cold. “That was possession. An Alpha King marking his territory. He is dying, and you are his most prized, most broken treasure—one he refuses to let go of.”
Her words felt like a bucket of ice water. Possession. Not love.
“Why are you calling me?” I whispered, my heart pounding.
“Look out the window.”
I walked to the glass and looked down at the street. A sleek silver Bentley with the Marshall crest idled by the curb.
“I am downstairs,” Gigi’s voice crackled through the speaker. “It’s time you learned the rules of the game you’re in.”
The heavy door of the silver Bentley closed, sealing me inside a world of cream leather and suffocating silence. The soundproof partition glided up, separating us from the driver. The air was thick with Gigi’s perfume—dry, sharp, like old books and fresh lilacs.
“You think I am a monster, Adella,” Gigi spoke, her aristocratic voice slicing through the quiet. She didn’t look at me, her gaze fixed on the blurred city lights outside the tinted window. “I married Kaelen Marshall not out of love, but to dismantle him from the inside for destroying my family’s company. I am a woman who calculates every casualty. But my greatest sin was a miscalculation.”
I clutched my burner phone, my heart hammering against my ribs. “What are you talking about?”