I Bought the Wrong Beastman, and He Begged Me to Keep Him Chapter 10

I Bought the Wrong Beastman, and He Begged Me to Keep Him Chapter 10

I couldn’t crawl out from under the grief of losing Adrian.

Theo stayed close, always trying to soothe me. He seemed different lately, sharper, more aware. Maybe

whatever treatment they’d given him was working.

“Adrian loved you, Miss Maren. That’s why he saved you.”

“If he’d known you loved him back, that would have been enough for him.”

I choked on a sob. “Then why didn’t he ever say it? Why did he keep pushing me away…”

My voice cracked. “If I’d known he loved me, if I’d known he didn’t want to leave, I never would have agreed to

the swap.”

Theo was quiet for a long time.

“When you went to work, Adrian used to warn me. He said you always wanted something new. That once you had something, you’d get bored of it. He said after you had me, it was only a matter of time before you got

rid of me too.”

“Maybe he was so scared of being thrown away that he made himself impossible to win over. Because if you never had him, you could never get tired of him.”

The room tilted.

I couldn’t move.

It hit me then. After Adrian and I were together for the first time, Tessa had called.

She’d teased me about getting obsessed with something, how I’d hype it up and lose interest the second I

had it.

And what had I said? “That’s just how I am. I lose interest once the chase is over. I only want things I can’t

have.”

Adrian had walked in right then, holding a glass of water. His face had gone completely pale.

I’d thought it was because I’d pushed him too hard.

I never knew…

I pressed my hands over my face, but the tears slipped through anyway.

“I was just running my mouth!”

“Why didn’t he just ask me?”

“If I’d known sooner, none of this would have happened…”

Theo flinched like the words had actually hit him. His eyes went red without warning, and something strange, almost desperate, flickered across his face. He squeezed his eyes shut, a visible tremor running through

him.

It was a long time before he said anything.

His voice shook, barely above a whisper.

“I heard Adrian was a test subject.”

“Maybe having someone to belong to, having you, meant so much to him that he was terrified of losing it. So

he never said anything.”

I chose a burial plot for Adrian.

I wanted to bring him home and lay him to rest.

But right then.

Tessa pulled me outside. She looked terrified.

“Maren, Conrad told me something. You need to brace yourself.”

I couldn’t imagine what could be worse than this.

Until she said it.

“The fur DNA matched Adrian’s file. But during the autopsy, they found the internal organs were mirrored.”

“Mirrored organs are extremely rare in hybrids. In the trafficking ring’s records, only one subject had them,

your golden-shaded hybrid.”

She swallowed. “The drugs left that subject cognitively impaired. They couldn’t sell him after that. So they dumped him on you instead.”

“Theo was the one who died in that car accident.”

“The one living in your house right now is not Theo.”