Chapter 608
Gigi turned her piercing gaze to Elder Malcolm, who was already trembling, his face the color of ash. “Malcolm,” she said, her voice thick with disgust. “You dare stand in this sacred hall alongside this honorless creature? Remove this disgrace from my sight immediately. Do not taint this ground further.”
Malcolm’s Inner Wolf cowered. He didn’t utter a single word in his own defense. He frantically signaled the guards, practically fleeing the chamber as they dragged Dosha out. The heavy doors slammed shut, sealing the three of us in a suffocating silence.
Gigi slowly approached the millennial oak table and stopped directly in front of Dallas. Without warning, she raised her ebony cane and struck the metal footrest of his wheelchair. The sharp clang made me flinch.
“Not quite dead yet, I see,” Gigi sneered, her eyes raking over his seated form. “Look at you. A broken Alpha, hiding behind the skirts of a wolfless Luna because you are too weak to even complete the Marking.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a vicious hiss. “The Lycan blood in your veins weeps at your cowardice.”
The word cowardice hit Dallas like a silver-tipped blade. I saw the way his shoulders curled inward, the way his breath snagged on something sharp and broken. His breathing turned ragged. A guttural, wounded sound caught in his throat—the closest thing to a howl his broken body could manage.
I couldn’t take it anymore. My protective instincts flared, overriding every trace of fear I held for the Matriarch. I stepped squarely between Gigi and Dallas’s wheelchair, forming a human shield.
“Stop it!” I demanded, my voice trembling but fierce. “You have no right to speak to him like that. You don’t know what the silver did to him, the pain he—”
“Do not presume to lecture me, little girl,” Gigi cut me off, her eyes locking onto mine with a chilling, almost pitying intensity. “Every time a silver bullet tore through his flesh, every time his Inner Wolf howled in the venom, the reports came directly to my private Mind-Link. I know every scar on his soul better than you do.”
I froze, the revelation stealing the breath from my lungs. She knew. She knew exactly how much he had suffered.
Gigi looked past me, her eyes shining with unshed tears, though her voice only grew harsher. “I sent you to the Dire Guard to be forged into steel, Dallas. Not to watch you become a self-pitying waste.”
That was the breaking point.
“I lost them all!” Dallas roared, his voice cracking as years of repressed trauma violently erupted. He gripped the armrests of his chair, his knuckles turning white. “I heard them in the Mind-Link, Gigi! I heard my Warriors screaming as the silver burned their souls to ash! I felt them die!”
“Then live for them!” Gigi roared back, her cane striking the floor. “Be the Alpha King they sacrificed their lives for!” She glared down at him, delivering her final, devastating blow. “Conquer your demons, Dallas. Or sign the title of Alpha King and the entire Marshall empire over to your mate through a blood oath, and crawl out of my sight as a wolfless coward.”
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