I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 80

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Chapter 80

Silas turned to me the moment the last guard was restrained. He crossed the space between us in two strides and pulled me against him, his arms wrapping around me so tightly that I could feel his heartbeat through his chest. I buried my face in the curve of his shoulder, breathing in the cedar scent of his care cream, letting the solid reality of him anchor me after everything that had just happened.

We had found the warehouse. We had rescued the victims. The evidence was secured, and Lucien’s operation in this location was finished.

But as I stood there in Silas’s arms, listening to the controlled chaos of Bureau officers processing the scene, I could not stop seeing Connor’s face–those bruised, desperate eyes looking at me from the floor of the tunnel–and Phoebe’s, the moment she realized that the monster she had chosen to ally with had just decided she was expendable.

We had saved the people in the cages.

But Connor and Phoebe were gone. Once again, they had fallen into Lucien’s hands.

The warehouse was a hive of controlled activity. Bureau officers moved through the space in methodical pairs, tagging evidence, photographing the cages, cataloging the experimental equipment that lined the walls like something out of a nightmare. The beastmen who had been freed were being processed by medical staff who had arrived with the first response team–blankets wrapped around shoulders, water bottles pressed into trembling hands, quiet voices asking questions that some of them were too broken to answer.

Kane found us near the side entrance. He was moving fast, his usual

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composed demeanor cracked just enough to show the fear underneath.

When he reached us, he stopped, his chest rising and falling from the run across the warehouse floor.

“I kept waiting for your signal,” he said, his voice low. “When the window closed and neither of you checked in, I had to make a call. I broke protocol.” He looked at me, then at Silas, and the apology in his eyes was genuine. He knew exactly what showing up here meant for the foundation–another night, another scandal, another round of headlines questioning whether the Kane Foundation was a legitimate operation or a personal vendetta dressed up as charity.

I shook my head. “If you hadn’t come, we might not have walked out of that tunnel.”

He didn’t argue with that. He just nodded once, his jaw tight, and let his gaze sweep the warehouse floor–the cages, the victims, the evidence that would either bring Lucien down or disappear into bureaucratic limbo.

The Bureau officer who took my statement was thorough and unhurried. She sat me down on a folding chair just outside the warehouse perimeter, a notebook open on her knee, and asked me to walk her through everything. I told her about the initial discovery of the transfer operation, the warehouse we’d identified, Connor’s role as an inside source using a decommissioned encrypted radio channel that most people in the Colosseum had forgotten existed. I told her about Phoebe’s separate, direct line to Lucien, and how she had been feeding him information about our movements from the very beginning. I told her about the maintenance tunnel, the ambush, and the escape route Lucien had used to take Connor and Phoebe with him.

She wrote it all down without interruption. When I finished, she asked me two more questions–whether I had any reason to believe Phoebe was acting under duress, and whether I thought Connor’s cooperation had been voluntary. I answered both as honestly as I could, which meant

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