I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 78

Silas moved in front of me in a single motion, his body a wall between me and the sealed exit. Every musele in his frame went rigid. The low, rolling growl that built in his chest was deeper than sound–it was vibration, felt through the floor and up through my boots. His ears were flat against his skull, his tail bristled to twice its normal width.

I looked past him, toward the other end of the tunnel, the end we had come from.

And my stomach dropped.

Because there, standing in the harsh light of a work lamp that hadn’t been there when we entered, was a figure I recognized instantly.

Connor.

His hands were cuffed behind his back. Blood traced a dark line from the corner of his mouth down his chin. His clothes were torn, his face bruised and swollen, and his eyes–when he lifted them to look at us–held nothing but a vast, hollow despair.

He had been caught. And he had led us straight into a trap. The maintenance tunnel had become a cage. The harsh warehouse lights bled through every seam in the metal partition ahead of us, and behind us, the entrance we’d crawled through was now blocked by two of Lucien’s men who had dropped a steel bar across the opening with a finality that echoed through the concrete walls. The narrow space, which had felt like our advantage only minutes ago, was now a trap with no way out.

Lucien stood at the sealed exit, his snake tail sliding across the floor in a slow, deliberate circle. He looked almost relaxed, the way a predator looks

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when it knows the prey has nowhere to run. His golden eyes caught tha light and held it, the vertical pupils narrowing as they settled on us.

Silas had me pinned behind him, his back a rigid line of tension, the low growl in his chest vibrating through the floor and up through the soles of my shoes. His ears were flattened against his skull, his tail bristled so wide it nearly filled the width of the tunnel behind me. He was ready throw himself forward, ready to tear through whatever stood between us and the exit, and the only thing keeping him from doing exactly that was the knowledge that I was directly behind him and there was nowhere for me to go.

Connor was on his knees in the middle of the corridor, two of Lucien’s men holding him down by the shoulders. Blood was still seeping from the corner of his mouth, and his face was a map of bruises, but when he lifted his eyes to meet mine, the look in them was not fear. It was guilt.

He would explain it to me later, in the hollow space between one crisis and the next. He had been using an old encrypted radio system inside the Colosseum, a relic from years ago that almost nobody remembered existed, and that was how he’d managed to pass intelligence to me without being detected. But Phoebe didn’t use that channel. She had her own private line to Lucien, a direct connection that bypassed every safeguard Connor had built. Everything we had planned, every move we had made, she had been feeding to Lucien in real time. We had never

stood a chance.

“Don’t blame Connor for this.” Lucien’s laugh was soft, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. His gaze swept over us with the unhurried confidence of someone who held every card in the room. “He’s just a useless piece on the board. The person who really kept me informed is standing right outside.”

The warehouse’s main door groaned open, and Phoebe walked in.

She was dressed casually, nothing like the carefully curated image she

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