I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 84

Chapter 84

The camera feed shifted, and there he was. Connor, chained to a metal pipe with his wrists bound above his head, his body slumped forward in a way that suggested he had been like that for a long time. His face was a landscape of fresh bruises, his shirt torn and stained. He was conscious, but barely–his head hung low, and every few seconds his shoulders trembled with what might have been shivering or might have been something worse.

A few meters away. Phoebe was curled into a ball on the ground. She wasn’t chained, but she wasn’t moving either. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, her face buried in her legs, and her entire body was shaking with the kind of tremor that comes when the mind has stopped trying to cope and the body is just running the machinery of panic on its

own.

My stomach tightened. I forced myself to keep watching.

Then the point man’s voice came through the earpiece, low and urgent. “Movement. The suspect has detected us.”

On the screen, Lucien’s head snapped up. His golden eyes caught the edge of a flashlight beam and reflected it back like a animal’s, the vertical pupils dilating and contracting in the same breath. He moved fast–faster than I’d expected from someone who had been on the run for days. One moment he was standing near the center of the chamber, and the next he had Connor by the throat, a knife pressed against the side of his neck, the blade catching the light in a thin, bright line.

“Suspect has a hostage. Knife to the throat. Requesting instructions.”

The command vehicle went very still. Every eye in the space turned to the

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main monitor, where Connor’s face was now pressed against Lucien’s shoulder, his eyes wide but his mouth shut tight. The Bureau officer in charge of the operation glanced at me.

This was the moment we had prepared for. I leaned forward and pressed the transmit button on the microphone.

“Lucien.” I kept my voice level, projecting calm I didn’t entirely feel. “You have nowhere left to go. The tunnels are surrounded. Every exit point is covered. Release the hostages and surrender. It’s the only way this ends without everyone getting hurt.”

On the screen, Lucien’s head tilted up. He had spotted one of the hidden cameras the advance team had planted during their approach, and a slow, ugly smile spread across his face. He laughed–a sound that carried through the earpiece with terrible clarity, bouncing off stone walls and coming back distorted.

“Aurora?” His voice was thick with mockery. “You’re sitting in some vehicle somewhere, too scared to even show your face? That’s not the woman I remember.”

He shifted the knife slightly, and Connor flinched but didn’t make a sound. Lucien leaned closer to him, his voice dropping into a register that was meant to be heard through every camera and microphone in the tunnel.

“Ask her to save you, Connor. Come on. You love her, don’t you? Ask her to come down here in person. Trade her life for yours. That’s what you’d \do, isn’t it?”

Connor’s whole body went rigid. His jaw locked. His eyes, still wide, found the camera lens, and for one terrible second I thought he was going to break–that he was going to scream my name, to beg, to do exactly what Lucien wanted.

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