Chapter 637
I found her in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her mattress. The styling team hadn’t come up yet. Azalea was holding a small, tarnished silver locket and a crumbling, leather-bound journal, staring at the yellowed pages with a single tear slipping down her cheek.
“Azalea?” I asked softly, stepping into the room. “Are you alright?”
She hastily wiped her face and tried to close the journal, but her hands were trembling too much. “It’s my mother’s,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I was looking for jewelry for tonight, and I found it hidden in the false bottom of her old vanity.”
I sat beside her and gently placed a hand on her arm. “What does it say?”
Azalea swallowed hard, her eyes wide with a terrifying vulnerability. “She didn’t just die of illness, Adella. She was running. Her maiden name was Valerius — an ancient, reclusive Pack in Europe.” She traced the jagged handwriting on the page. “She wrote that the Valerius bloodline is cursed. The males lose their wolves as they age, rotting from the inside out. She said they use the females of the bloodline to purify themselves through dark rituals. She fled to America with my father, Zane, to hide me from them.”
My blood ran cold. “Azalea, that’s just a journal entry from decades ago. You are safe here. Dallas is your father now. The Blackwood Pack protects you.”
“But what if the blood is tainted, Adella?” she sobbed, looking at me with absolute despair. “What if I carry that curse inside me? What if I’m toxic?”
“You are not toxic,” I said fiercely, pulling her into a hug. “You are Azalea Sterling. You are fierce, and loyal, and good.”
She clung to me for a moment, taking a deep, shuddering breath. When she pulled away, the vulnerability was forcibly shoved down, replaced by a desperate, reckless fire. She needed an anchor tonight — someone to prove her fears wrong.
As we walked downstairs later, the eastern exit of the foyer was draped in shadows. Gamma Vance Decker stood there like a monument carved from ice.
Azalea didn’t walk past him. She stepped directly into his personal space, stopping mere inches from his broad chest. She tilted her head up, her eyes burning with a desperate challenge — searching for a crack in his armor, a single spark of emotion to prove she wasn’t a cursed, unlovable thing.
I had seen her look at him this way before, but tonight, the stakes in her heart were infinitely higher.
Vance didn’t flinch. His jaw was locked, his gaze fixed straight ahead, completely ignoring the beautiful, trembling She-wolf standing before him.
For a full minute, the air between them crackled with unspoken words. Finally, Azalea let out a harsh, defeated breath. She spun on her heel and stormed away.
But as I turned to head back to the dining room, a sliver of morning light caught the shadow where Vance stood. His right hand, encased in a black tactical glove, was clenched so tightly at his side that the leather groaned — the fist of a man fighting a silent, agonizing war against his own soul.
.