Chapter 10
He let out a guttural, wet snarl that rattled my very soul.
He raised his massive, clawed hands—not to snap my neck, not to tear out my throat.
With a terrifying, unnatural force, Oberon wrapped his blood-slicked fingers around my own trembling hands, locking his grip over mine around the bone hilt of the dagger.
His muscles surged with demonic power.
He didn't pull the blade away.
With bared fangs and an agonizing, choked roar of pure madness, the rabid Alpha forced my trembling hands, and the lethal silver blade within them, violently down toward the center of his own chest.
*BOOM!*
The battering ram struck the ironwood doors a third time.
The reinforced timber finally shattered. The iron bands sheared off their mountings, the doors exploding inward in a hail of jagged oak splinters and twisted iron.
Fenris stood in the breach, his ceremonial blade raised, his blood-red eyes fixed hungrily on the Alpha’s exposed chest.
And in that split second of paralyzed, breathless terror, as the cold tip of the dagger touched the skin above Oberon’s frantic, thundering heart, my elbow struck the edge of the newly opened floorboard.
A single, dust-caked parchment rolled out from the hidden cavity beneath the altar, unfurling across the blood-stained flagstones directly beneath my eyes.
It was an adoption parchment, dated fifteen years ago, sealed with Oberon’s personal crest in golden wax.
My gaze caught the very first line of the document, written in Oberon’s unmistakable hand—a single, staggering sentence that tore through fifteen years of lies, shattering every belief I had ever held about why the monster had spared my life:
*“I have taken the human child not to be my shield, nor to be my pet, but because in all this cursed realm, she alone carries no wolf-blood in her veins—and only hands untouched by the beast can grant me the mercy of a clean death.”*
