I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 97

Chapter 97

My breath caught..

“How many?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe a dozen. Maybe more. They were supposed to be in the same shipment as us, but they vanished somewhere in transit. No one ever talked about them. The handlers just. didn’t mention it.”

Another ghost. Another group of shifters, unaccounted for, still out there somewhere.

We left the visiting room in silence.

The corridor was long, lit by the same buzzing fluorescents. My shoes clicked against the tile. Silas walked beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched.

Halfway down the hall, his arm came around my shoulders. He pulled me against his side, just for a moment. His grip was firm.

“Whatever the court decides,” he said, his voice low, “I’m standing next to you.”

The courthouse was packed.

Every seat in the gallery was filled. Reporters lined the press section, cameras mounted on tripods, lenses pointed at the bench. The trial was being livestreamed in full–every word, every face, every piece of evidence broadcast to the public in real time.

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Jessica had been at it for days, whipping her followers into a frenzy Hall

the internet was tuned in, waiting to see the “heroic” Miss Collins and her Sclass beast get torn apart on screen.

The judge called the court to order.

Phoebe’s case was first.

The charges were laid out one by one: inciting kidnapping, colluding with organised criminals, deliberate assault, leaking operational intelligence. The evidence was overwhelming–chat logs, witness testimony, surveillance footage, my own medical records.

Phoebe took the stand.

She tried to play the victim. Her voice cracked as she talked about growing up in the Lower District, about hunger, about hardship. About how the world had never been kind to her. Tears streamed down her face. The gallery shifted. Some people looked sympathetic.

But then the prosecution displayed the messages. The ones she’d sent to Lucien’s people. The ones where she’d agreed to help set me up. The ones where she’d laughed about it.

Her performance fell apart.

The judge didn’t hesitate. Guilty on all counts. Lengthy imprisonment.

‘Phoebe was led away, her face blank, the mask finally stripped off.

Connor’s hearing came next.

The court acknowledged his cooperation–his role as an insider, the

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intelligence he’d provided, the way he’d helped dismantle the warehouse operation. That counted for something.

But it didn’t erase what he’d done before. The stalking. The obsession. The times he’d carried messages for Lucien, willingly or not.

The judge weighed it all. Mitigating factors and prior offences, side by side. The final ruling was lenient–reduced sentence, credit for assistance- but not absolution.

When it was over, I caught sight of him across the hall.

He was standing near the exit, still in his detention centre clothes. His face was calm. Not the desperate, pleading look he’d worn when we’d me in the visiting room. Just. quiet. Resigned.

Our eyes met for a second.

He didn’t look at me like he wanted me back. He didn’t look at me like anything

I looked away first.

Whatever that twisted thing between us had been, it was done now.

Then came the main event.

The case against Lucien Harrington.

Illegal experimentation on shifters. Illegal detention. Trafficking of sentient beings.

The prosecution laid out the evidence. Warehouse photographs. Survivor statements. Connor’s testimony. The records we’d fought so hard to obtain.

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But the defence was ready.

They attacked every gap. They pointed to the missing witness–the one who’d vanished. They argued that without his direct testimony, the chain of evidence was incomplete. They raised procedural objections,

questioned the legality of certain searches, challenged the admissibility of photographs taken inside the warehouse,

And somewhere beneath the surface, I could feel it. The resistance. The invisible pressure from inside the system. The judge’s pauses, slightly too long. The way certain objections were sustained without real debate.,

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