I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 85

Chapter 85

On the blueprints, that passage had been marked as a narrow maintenance corridor that connected to the chamber from an angle Lucien couldn’t see without turning his back on Connor. The flanking team was three people- two Bureau agents and one of Kane’s security specialists, all of them beastmen with the kind of quiet movement that came from predatory training. They were close. So close that the encirclement was almost complete.

Then Phoebe moved.

It happened so fast that the monitors couldn’t track it cleanly. One moment she was curled on the ground, and the next she was on her feet, lunging forward with a scream that tore through the earpiece like glass breaking. She grabbed for the knife in Lucien’s hand–not with strategy, not with intent, but with the blind, desperate energy of someone whose mind had finally fractured completely.

Lucien reacted on instinct. He twisted the blade away from Connor’s throat, but not fast enough. The edge caught his forearm, opening a long. bright line of red that bloomed across his skin in the harsh light.

The pain hit him like a switch being flipped. His face contorted, his golden eyes going wide and then narrow in the same instant, and his tail- his massive, powerful snake tail–whipped around with a force that sounded like a tree branch snapping. It caught Phoebe across the torso and lifted her off her feet. She flew backward through the air and hit the stone wall with a sound that was too dull, too final, and then she was on the ground, not moving, her head at an angle that made me stop breathing.

The earpiece exploded into chaos. Shouting, the crack of impacts, someone calling for backup, the wet sound of a struggle on stone. The

Gom

4

RG

1535

Chapter 85

flanking team had been forced to move early, abandoning their approach angle to engage Lucien directly before he could recover and reposition. The monitors flickered–one went dark entirely, another showed nothing but a ceiling spinning wildly, and a third held just long enough to show Silas’s tail lashing against the back of my chair as he leaned forward, his whole body rigid.

Then two more feeds cut out. The signal degraded into bursts of static. The command vehicle filled with the sound of voices overlapping, none of them calm anymore, and the officer in charge was on his feet, barking orders into his own microphone, and I was gripping the edge of the console so hard my knuckles had gone white.

Silas’s hand was still on my shoulder. His fingers had tightened to the point of pain, but neither of us noticed.

On the last remaining monitor, the image was grainy and half–obscured, but I could see movement–shapes colliding, the flash of a blade, the thick coil of a snake tail striking and retreating and striking again. And somewhere in that chaos, Connor was still chained to the pipe, and Phoebe was still on the ground, and Lucien was fighting like a man who had decided that if he was going down, he was taking as many people with him as he could.

The signal cut out. The screen went black.

And everyone in the command vehicle was holding their breath, waiting for a voice–any voice–to come back through the earpiece and tell us what had happened in the dark.

The command vehicle felt like it had shrunk. The walls were too close, the air too warm, the blue glow of the monitors casting everything in a color that made the faces around me look like they belonged to strangers. The last working screen showed nothing but static now, the image cutting in and out in jagged bursts that made my eyes ache from trying to find shapes in the noise.

39828

4

RG

1531

L)hap 1 པྲཀྭ

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify