I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 86

Chapter 86

The minutes stretched. Someone in the vehicle muttered a curse under their breath. The Bureau officer in charge was on his feet, pacing the narrow space between the consoles, his own earpiece pressed tight against his head. Every few seconds he would open his mouth to give an order and then close it again, because there was nothing to give orders about. We were past the point of commands. Everything now depended on the people in the dark.

And then, suddenly, a voice cut through the static. Clear. Close. The kind of clarity that meant the communication link had been reestablished.

“Target secured. Repeat, target is down and restrained.”

The officer stopped pacing. The entire vehicle went silent.

“Hostage status. Connor Fletcher–multiple contusions, significant blood loss, conscious, no life–threatening injuries. Phoebe Collins–head trauma, unconscious, being loaded onto a stretcher for emergency transport.”

The breath I’d been holding came out of me in a rush I didn’t try to control. Beside me, Silas’s hand tightened on my shoulder for one second, then eased. Around the vehicle, shoulders dropped. Someone exhaled audibly. The officer closed his eyes and pressed two fingers against his temple.

It was over.

They let us go to the tunnel exit.

The night air outside was cold and clean after the recycled staleness of the command vehicle. The mouth of the tunnel gaped open in the side of a

D GON

4

RG

1537

Спарень

Mra douchet

concrete embankment, floodlights rigged around it by the tactical tear casting harsh white light across the ground. Medical personnel were assembled in a loose row, stretchers lined up, the back of an ambulance visible down the path with its doors open and its interior lights on.

Silas stood beside me, his arm across my back, his tail wrapped loosely around my waist in a way that was less affection than structure. Without it, I thought I might actually fall over.

The first stretcher came out.

Connor was on it. His face was the color of old paper, his lips cracked and dry, his shirt so torn and stained that the medical team had cut most of it away and draped a blanket over him instead. An IV line ran from his arm into a bag of fluid hanging from the stretcher’s metal frame. He was awake, but his eyes were half–lidded, and the effort of keeping them open seemed to cost him something.

When they brought him past us, he turned his head.

His eyes found mine, and for the first time in as long as I’d known him, there was nothing in them that I recognized as longing. No calculation, no plea, no quiet bargaining. Just a vast, bone–deep weariness, and underneath it, something that might have been relief.

“Aurora.” His voice was barely audible over the hum of the ambulance engine. “I did what I needed to do. I’m not asking for forgiveness.”

I stood where I was. I didn’t step closer, and I didn’t step away. The words I had prepared were simple, and I delivered them without anger and without softness.

“I’ll report to the Bureau everything you did–every piece of intelligence you passed, every risk you took to help this operation succeed. That will be part of the record.” I paused. “But the things you did before that, the harm you caused–that still has to be answered for.”

30451

4

RG

15:31

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify