Chapter 295
Chapter 295:
I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was back in that dark, freezing cellar. I remembered shattering the lock. I remembered the suffocating, burning stench of lethal silver and fresh blood. But most of all, my Alpha wolf remembered the girl I had pulled from the darkness.
She had been clawing at the silver door in a desperate bid for survival. Her left wrist was a mangled, bleeding mess of deep, jagged gouges — the flesh burned and torn by the toxic metal.
My eyes snapped open. My breathing turned ragged.
Kira’s wrists were flawless. They always had been.
The realization hit me with the force of a freight train. Kira wasn’t the girl in the vault. She had never been the victim. Adelina was. And I had spent years punishing the girl who had actually suffered, while protecting the monster who put her there.
Forty minutes later, I pushed open the door of a cheap diner in Queens. The air was thick with the smell of stale coffee, frying bacon, and years of accumulated grease.
Martha Hayes, the former human head maid of the Parrish family, sat in a cracked red pleather booth. She looked terrified as I slid into the seat opposite her. I didn’t bother with pleasantries. I pulled a pen from my coat, wrote a six-figure check, and pushed it across the sticky laminate table.
“You have the protection of the Davenport Pack,” I said, my voice a low, commanding rumble that made the silverware rattle. “You and your family will never have to worry again. I just need one thing, Martha. Tell me everything about the vault p>
Martha stared at the zeros on the check, her hands trembling. She swallowed hard, overcoming her ingrained fear of the Parrish family.
“The girl locked in the vault was never Miss Kira, Alpha,” Martha whispered, a tear slipping down her wrinkled cheek. “It was always the Wolfe child p>
R𝘰𝗆an𝖼𝘦 ո𝘰𝘷𝘦𝗅ѕ 𝗼𝘯
The diner’s ambient noise faded into a dull ringing in my ears. I sat alone in that greasy booth, completely buried beneath the ruins of a kingdom of lies I had helped build.
Jase POV
I stumbled out of the greasy diner and collapsed into the driver’s seat of my McLaren, parked on a desolate street in Queens. The dawn light bleeding through the windshield was gray and unforgiving. The cramped interior of the car felt like a coffin, the air rapidly souring with the metallic, acrid scent of my own shame.
It was always the Wolfe child.
Martha’s words echoed in the tight space, tearing down the last remaining walls of my fractured sanity.
Suddenly, the repressed memory I had fought so hard to bury exploded in my mind. I was back in that freezing, dark cellar. I remembered shattering the lock. I remembered the suffocating, burning stench of lethal silver and fresh blood.
But this time, the shadows cleared.