Chapter 511
“Adella, wait,” Azalea’s voice cracked, thick with fresh tears and a terrifying undercurrent of dread. “He… he stabilized. Dr. Vance brought him back from the brink. But Duncan told him where you were. He told him you were with Anson.”
Relief washed over me for a fraction of a second, only to be instantly obliterated by the sheer terror in her tone. “What did he do, Azalea?”
“He’s invoking the Scorched Earth Edict,” she sobbed, the words tumbling out in a panicked rush. “He’s pulling all funding from your university project. Every single cent. Adella, he said… he said if you won’t stay in the safe harbor he built, he’ll burn the pirate ship you’re trying to board.”
A notification chimed against my ear. I pulled the phone away, my eyes locking onto a text from Finn, my university colleague.
Marshall Group just froze all our accounts. The project is dead, Adella. What happened?
The agonizing wail of my mate-bond abruptly snapped. The frantic, desperate love that had driven me to the edge of madness only moments ago was instantly swallowed by a towering, blinding rage.
Dallas hadn’t just survived; he had woken up and immediately reached for his favorite weapon—control. He thought he could leash me with money. He thought he could punish me for not sitting obediently in the gilded cage he had designed for me.
“Adella?” Azalea whispered through the speaker.
“I have to go, Azalea,” I said, my voice eerily calm. I hung up the phone.
I stood under the harsh streetlight, the biting wind whipping my hair across my face. I looked toward my car, the vehicle that was supposed to take me to Dr. Vance’s clinic, to the side of a dying King. Then I slowly turned my head, looking back up at the illuminated window of Dr. Evans’s VIP suite.
To fight a tyrant, you needed power. You needed an Alpha who was willing to play dirty.
I didn’t get into my car. I turned on my heel and walked back through the sliding glass doors of the clinic.
When I pushed open the door to the VIP suite, Anson was still standing where I had left him, his chest heaving, his injured arm dripping blood onto the pristine floor. He looked up, his eyes widening in disbelief as I stepped back into the room and closed the door behind me.
I met his gaze, my expression carved from ice.
“Dallas Marshall has cut my funding,” I stated, the words ringing with finality in the quiet room. “He has declared war on me.”
The shock on Anson’s face melted away. Slowly, a dark, predatory smile spread across his lips, the golden hue of his wolf bleeding back into his eyes as he realized what my return meant.
“Then let me help you fight him, Adella,” Anson murmured, stepping toward me. “I will save your project.”
Two days had passed since I walked back into Anson’s suite. The morning sun did nothing to thaw the ice in my veins. Standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows of Hyde Industries’ top-floor office, I stared out at the city, my hands clenched at my sides.