Chapter 26 26
Chapter 26 26
A low, vibrating growl, the kind that makes your very bones ache, echoed inches from my ear.
“Scary? No,” I managed to say, my voice trembling as I reached for my drink. “Persistent is the word I’d use.”
I felt the heat of Silas’s chest against my back. He didn't touch me, but he was so close I could feel the rhythmic thud of his heart.
It was a terrifying, steady beat that mocked my own frantic pulse. “Who is he, Lyra?” Silas’s voice was a jagged rasp, his breath ghosting over the shell of my ear. I could feel the bartender stiffen, his amused expression vanishing as he realized he was standing in the path of a hurricane.
“He’s just the man serving me a drink, Silas. Something you wouldn't know anything about,” I shot back, trying to keep my spine rigid.
I refused to look at him. I refused to let him see how much his proximity was making my wolf howl for a touch I knew would destroy me.
Silas reached out, his large, calloused hand sliding onto the bar next to mine. He didn't grab me. Instead, he slowly reached for my glass.
His fingers brushed against mine, a brief, electric contact that made a jolt of unwanted desire flare in my gut.
“You’re drinking poison,” he muttered, his eyes fixed on the liquid before he took a long, slow swallow, never taking his gaze off the side of my face. “And you’re doing it in a room full of mongrels who are looking at you like you’re the next meal.”
“I’ve survived mongrels before,” I snapped, finally turning my head to glare at him. “I even survived the one who claims to be their king.”
Silas snorted, a dark, bitter sound. He slammed the empty glass back onto the wood, the sound echoing like a gunshot. I could see the battle behind his eyes, the urge to drag me out of there vs. the desperate need to make me stay.
“I’m not here to fight you, Lyra,” he said, though the way his fists were clenched told a different story. “But you’re coming with me. Now.”
The bartender opened his mouth to intervene, but Bill stepped up, placing a hand on the bar with a quiet, lethal finality. The message was clear: Stay out of this.
I looked at the glass, then at Silas, and finally at my own trembling hands. I took a final sip of the burning liquid, trying to find the strength to face the storm I had tried so hard to outrun.
Silas’s POV
The moment we stepped into the bar, the air shifted. Usually, these places smell of stale yeast and desperation, but all I could perceive was the soft, intoxicating aroma of my mate hitting me like a gale force wind.
My eyes scanned the room with predatory precision, and my fists clamped shut so tight my tendons creaked when I saw her.
Lyra was sitting on a bar stool, leaning in and chatting comfortably with the bartender.
She was smiling, actually smiling, with those lips I had spent every night for five years dreaming about.
The sight should have been a relief, but instead, it felt like a serrated blade to my gut. Seeing her give that warmth to another man, a nameless human who didn't know the value of the treasure in front of him, made my inner wolf roar for blood.
I couldn't look away. She was breathtakingly beautiful in that tiny, suffocating uniform.
Every time she breathed, the fabric strained against her chest, and the way she shifted on the stool, squeezing those long, ivory thighs together, made my vision go red with a mix of lust and possessive fury.
“Mine,” my wolf snarled, pacing in the dark corners of my mind. “Take her. Mark her. Kill the interloper.”
I wanted to do a thousand things to her, and half of them were sins. But jealousy was a faster poison. It was eating me alive.
It had been bad enough watching her with that pathetic Damian on their date, but seeing her relaxed here, in a place I didn't control, was torture.
“Control yourself, Silas,” Bill’s voice hissed in my head through the mental link. “Your aura is leaking. You’re scaring the locals and making the glass on the tables vibrate.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” I shot back, my eyes never leaving Lyra.
She looked so delicate, yet there was a hardness to her now that I had carved into her soul. As I watched her, a memory I tried to bury every morning flooded back, uninvited and suffocating.
I remembered that day in the pack, the sky a dull, weeping grey. Lyra had been kneeling on the frozen earth of the village square, her cheeks stained with salt and dirt, her gaze vacant as my father barked out the sentence for a crime she never committed.
I had stood right beside her. My jaw had been locked so tight I thought my teeth would shatter, my heart tearing in two. My duty as the future Alpha demanded absolute obedience to the crown, but my wolf was howling in agonizing protest at the sight of her so broken.
Back then, I was a coward. I stood motionless, a statue of ice, letting the hatred of the pack consume her. I felt her eyes searching for mine, begging for a single trace of the boy who used to sneak her wildflowers.
I didn't give it to her. I let her be cast out into the mouth of winter.
That memory burned in my marrow. Seeing her now, free, beautiful, and filled with a resentment I had personally sown, was my own private hell. I wanted to sprint to her, snatch her off that stool, and hold her until the memory of her tears evaporated. But to her, I wasn't a savior. I was the architect of her ruin.
“Silas, you’re going to break the bottle,” Bill warned again, his voice sharp with genuine concern.
I looked down. The glass bottle in my hand was beginning to spiderweb under the pressure of my grip. I shoved it onto the table and let out a heavy, ragged breath.
“You are a disgrace to our ancestors!” my wolf barked, his voice dripping with the kind of contempt that felt like a whip to my ego. “She is right there, while that insect flirts with her! And you sit here like a neutered dog!”
My wolf was right. Any other Alpha would have claimed his mate by now, marking the territory with the bartender’s blood. But I was paralyzed by the weight of my own sins.