I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 76

Chapter 76

He was quiet for a long time. I let him be.

Then he spoke, his voice lower than usual, as if the words cost him something to say out loud. “When I was in that office just now, watching you and Kane going over the case materials together, I felt it. Jealousy. He kept his eyes on the road. “My rational mind tells me you’re just working together, that it’s a partnership built on a shared objective. But the instinct part of me–the part I can’t just shut off–it doesn’t care about rationality. It just sees another S–rank male standing close to the person I’m bound to, and it resents him for it.”

I turned in my seat to face him. He still hadn’t looked at me, and I could see the tension in the line of his shoulders, the way his ears were angled slightly back. I reached over and put my hands on either side of his face, turning his head toward me until his amber eyes met mine.

“At the binding ceremony, you became my only partner,” I said. “Kane is a comrade. That’s all he is, and that’s all he will ever be. Every work conversation, every field operation, every piece of information that passes through my hands–you get all of it, without exception. That trust isn’t something that rumors can shake, and it isn’t something that other people’s opinions can change.”

The tension in his shoulders eased, slowly, like something had unclenched inside him. He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my forehead, soft and lingering.

We didn’t get far before my phone rang.

Kane. I answered on speaker.

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“The technician agreed,” he said, without preamble. “He’s willing to cooperate. He can hand over the original building archives tomorrow

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Silas glanced at me, and for the first time since we’d left the foundation, something like relief

crossed his face.

But the relief didn’t last.

Before I could respond to Kane, a second notification appeared on my screen. Connor’s encrypted channel. I told Kane I’d call him back and opened the message.

“The risk of exposure is growing. Lucien’s people have started suspecting there’s a leak inside. The window we have is closing fast.”

I stared at the words until they blurred. The feeling in my chest was heavy, the kind of weight that came from knowing we were running out of time and having no way to slow the clock down. Whatever we were going to do, it had to happen soon after we got the blueprints. There would be no second chances.

That night, lying in bed in the dark, Silas pulled me against him from behind. His arm draped across my waist, his chest warm against my back. His breath stirred the hair at the nape of my neck.

“Whatever decision we end up making,” he said, his voice low and rough in the quiet room, “I’m standing beside you. Just promise me one thing–no matter what happens, you put your own safety first.”

The next afternoon we were back at the foundation. Kane laid a stack of yellowed printed blueprints across the conference table, the paper curling slightly at the edges from age. The original building archives for the warehouse district had finally arrived.

The retired technician had kept them in pristine condition. Every sheet

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