Chapter 734:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

“No,” Elara whispered. “She was raised in the Marshall empire, Adella. She saw right through my pathetic lie. She knows it’s a massive secret.”

I closed my eyes, a suffocating dread wrapping around my throat. But the nightmare wasn’t over.

“That’s not the worst part,” Elara said, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. “Our spy in the penthouse just reported back. Right after Cassia hung up with me, she tried to lock the mechanical wolf inside her personal biometric safe. But before she could close the heavy steel door, Eleanor ‘Gigi’ Marshall walked into the living room.”

The air in my lungs vanished.

“Gigi demanded to know what she was hiding,” Elara recounted, painting a picture of absolute terror. “Cassia lied. She said she just didn’t want the maids to break Uncle Dallas’s expensive toy. But Gigi’s ancient inner wolf instantly sensed the deceit. Gigi didn’t call her out. She just used her Matriarch authority to order Cassia upstairs to change for tonight’s Pack gala.”

“And the safe?” I rasped.

“Cassia locked it and left,” Elara whimpered. “But the spy said Gigi didn’t follow her. Gigi just stood alone in the center of the Persian rug, leaning on her ebony cane, staring dead at the biometric safe. She knows Dallas is in the middle of the Geneva underworld. A secret package arriving now, her instincts are screaming that something is fatally wrong.”

The line went dead.

I slowly lowered the phone, the dial tone hissing in the quiet sanctuary. I was trapped in a subterranean bunker in Europe, fighting a bloody war against the Syndicate to save my husband’s life. But across the ocean, the impenetrable walls of my New York fortress were crumbling from the inside out.

Elara’s POV

𝗧𝘩𝗈u𝘀𝘢ո𝘥𝗌 𝘰𝗳 𝘳𝖾a𝗱e𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝘯 𝘨𝘢𝘭𝗻𝘰vе𝗅𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺

The terrified silence at the end of my phone call with Adella still echoed in my mind like a death knell. Now, forty-eight hours after the bloodbath at the Geneva shipyard, I was standing in the suffocating opulence of The Obsidian Club, trying to keep the crumbling walls of our New York fortress intact.

The air in the exclusive closed-door venue was thick with the oppressive pheromones of high-ranking Wall Street wolves and the sharp tang of expensive champagne. I smoothed the skirt of my plunging emerald velvet gown, forcing a polite, hollow smile as I conversed with a few Pack Elders. I had to maintain the illusion that S&D Design was functioning perfectly. More importantly, I had to get my cowardly colleague, Marcus Thorne, on a flight to the Swiss Pack branch tomorrow morning before Eleanor “Gigi” Marshall’s interrogation broke him.

A sudden, freezing chill washed over my spine.

A heavy hand clamped down on my bare arm, the grip bruising and absolute. My inner wolf let out a low, defensive growl, instantly recoiling from the controlling touch. I was roughly pulled into a secluded, dimly lit corner of the club.

.

.

.