Chapter 235 - 0235

Kaelen POV

"Better?" Darius asked, watching me carefully through the rearview mirror.

I nodded weakly, my chest still heaving as I struggled to catch my breath. The suppressant had done its job, but it left me feeling completely hollowed out, like something vital had been scraped raw from the inside of my bones.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. The car remained parked within the Council’s territory, the engine humming quietly beneath the heavy silence. All I could hear was my own ragged breathing and the faint sounds of guards moving somewhere outside.

Eventually, I muttered through gritted teeth, "Kill that bastard."

Darius’s eyebrow lifted as he turned slightly in his seat to look at me. "You know you can’t do that, Kaelen. You can’t just execute a sitting Alpha without solid proof. If you go after him right now, what exactly is your official reason? That he wants your woman? That he pissed you off?"

I knew exactly where Darius was coming from. He wasn’t defending Jaxen. He was trying to keep me from making a move that would hand the Council the perfect excuse to come after me.

If I killed Jaxen now, I wouldn’t just be dealing with the consequences of unlawfully executing another pack leader. I would be giving the Council a reason to question my authority and, worse, dragging Lorelei straight into the middle of it. Her entire past, her identity, everything she had spent years hiding could be exposed to the entire empire.

A part of me wanted to tell Darius that I didn’t care.

Yes, Jaxen wanting Lorelei was enough reason for me. Him putting his hands on her, lying about her, and trying to take her away from me was more than enough to deserve a death sentence. If it were up to the part of me that was still burning with rage, I would have Jaxen’s severed head mounted on a spike outside the estate gates before sunset.

But the colder, more rational part of my mind, the part that was barely keeping me from losing control again, knew Darius wasn’t wrong.

Jaxen living another day was infuriating, but I couldn’t kill him, not yet at least.

I let out a quiet breath and met Darius’s gaze.

"Not that bastard," I growled. "I meant Augustus."

Darius’s eyes widened for a second, and I could practically see his thoughts racing. Out of everyone on the High Council, Augustus was considered the least problematic. He rarely spoke, hardly ever bothered voting on minor disputes, and had never caused any trouble in public. Most of the time, he simply sat in his seat, watching everything in silence.

"Augustus?" Darius repeated, his brow pulling together in confusion. "Why the hell Augustus?"

I shifted against the leather seat, trying to ignore the deep, lingering ache near my core. "Can’t you tell?"

The scene in the chamber flashed through my mind again. Augustus’s hollow, almost lifeless eyes. That knowing, unsettling smile. The way he had looked at me as if he could see straight through my skin and into the darkness coiled beneath it.

"He knows," I said through gritted teeth when Darius remained silent. "He fucking knows about my curse."

Within seconds, Darius’s expression hardened. I watched the realization settle in as the pieces began falling into place in his mind. He was sharp, sometimes even sharper than me, so it didn’t take long for him to understand just how dangerous what I had said was.

His jaw tightened until I heard the faint click of it before he finally spoke, his voice dropping into a low, controlled tone.

"How do we kill him?"

Now that was a conversation I could get behind.

A bitter, shadowed smile pulled at the corner of my lips. This was the ruthless side of Darius I actually enjoyed.

"They play dirty all the time," I said, and my mind immediately went to the other elders, Thomas and Viktor in particular.

Augustus knew about every single one of their filthy schemes, yet he had never once reported them to me. He had watched them manipulate, scheme, and cross every line they could get away with while sitting comfortably in his chair and saying nothing.

That made him an accomplice.

It made him complicit.

And as far as I was concerned, that made him just as guilty as the rest of them.

And then there was that smile.

That knowing, unsettling smile that felt less like amusement and more like a threat. He had looked at me as though he were watching an hourglass slowly run out of sand, like he knew a secret I didn’t and was simply waiting for me to destroy myself from the inside out.

I had hidden this curse for so long. Even the guards who knew about the ferocious, bloodthirsty beast locked away in the deepest dungeons of the estate had no idea it was connected to my very soul. I had spent years keeping it contained, controlled, and buried in the darkness where no one could find it.

How could I let all of that come crashing down now?

Especially now that Lorelei was in my life. Now that I finally had someone I couldn’t bear to lose.

"We’ll stage an assassination," I said coldly. "Something clean. Something that can’t be traced back to us."

It was the simplest option. We already had more than enough threats to deal with without turning the entire High Council against us over one elder.

Darius nodded once, then fell silent. He studied me through the mirror for a long moment, clearly lost in thought, before asking the one question that cut straight through my rage.

"Don’t you want to know how he figured it out?"

Now that was a damn good point.

Silence settled over the car. My hands slowly curled into fists at my sides, and my claws slipped out just enough to dig into my palms. The sharp sting of pain grounded me, burning away the last of the fog left by the suppressant and forcing my thoughts into focus.

As much as I wanted Augustus dead right now, if he had truly discovered my curse, I needed answers first. I needed to know how he found out, if only to make sure there wasn’t another rat hiding somewhere inside my own estate.

"Then we will keep him alive long enough to force the truth out of him," I said while my claws dug deeper into my skin until they broke through. Warm blood pooled in my palms before slipping between my fingers and dripping onto the leather seat.

The sight made Darius release a quiet, exhausted sigh. He leaned back slightly, his eyes fixed on my bleeding hands through the rearview mirror.

"Your trigger seems to have evolved," he said quietly.