Chapter 258
Chapter 258:
Her pupils contracted sharply. The breath was knocked from her lungs as though an invisible fist had driven itself into her diaphragm.
A massive, dark figure stood motionless in the center of the dim hallway. He looked like a grotesque statue hewn from pure nightmare.
Cole.
He stood less than three feet away, his custom-tailored suit completely destroyed — soaked flat against his body by the freezing Boston rain, dark drops falling from the hem of his jacket and spreading into the pristine hotel carpet. His hair was plastered against his forehead. But it was his eyes that turned the blood in June’s veins to ice.
His eyes were completely bloodshot, the whites fractured with jagged red lines. He looked exactly like a cornered animal a single provocation away from tearing out a throat, his chest heaving with violent, ragged breath.
Cole didn’t look at June’s face.
His gaze shot directly over her shoulder, slicing through the open doorway, and locked onto Crawford.
Crawford stood a few feet behind June, already changed into a dark tactical shirt, the top buttons undone — every detail of the scene confirming, to Cole’s unhinged mind, exactly what he had already decided was true.
Four in the morning. A hotel suite. Both of them awake.
𝘓𝗮tе𝘀𝘵 сh𝗮𝗉𝗍𝘦rѕ o𝗻
The visual drove into Cole like a sledgehammer. A wave of suffocating, toxic jealousy detonated in his chest, burning through him. His jaw clenched until the bone looked ready to snap through his skin. His lips pulled back into a trembling, vicious snarl.
“Did you have fun?” He forced the words out — his voice completely unrecognizable, a raw, gravelly scrape soaked in lethal venom. The malice in it dropped the temperature of the hallway to absolute zero.
Crawford’s expression turned to solid ice. He took one large, deliberate step forward, his broad shoulders shifting to block Cole’s line of sight to June entirely. His right hand moved smoothly to the small of his back, fingers brushing the cold metal of the Walther PPK at his waistband. He was ready.
But June moved faster.
She stepped sideways and placed herself directly in the narrow space between the two men. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t retreat. She tilted her chin up and looked into Cole’s bloodshot eyes with an expression that held not a single trace of fear — only a profound, freezing disgust, the quiet contempt reserved for something already beneath consideration.
The three of them stood locked in a dead, suffocating standoff.
Cole’s eyes dragged slowly down June’s body, lingering on the thick hotel bathrobe visible beneath her open trench coat. His gaze felt like acid against her skin. His hands, hanging at his sides, curled into fists — knuckles bleaching white, joints cracking audibly in the silent hallway.
June could feel the destructive energy radiating off his soaked frame. He was a ticking bomb of fractured ego and toxic obsession.
She let out a slow, quiet breath. The corner of her mouth pulled into a sharp, merciless smirk.