Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 101

POV: Damian

Three years. A thousand and ninety-five days. Each one a carbon copy of the last, a gray, featureless landscape of regret. The hollow ache in my chest where the bond had once been had not faded with time. It was a constant, phantom limb, a permanent, gnawing reminder of the soul I had personally amputated.

Tonight, I was in a special kind of hell. A hell of my own making, decorated with crystal chandeliers and the cloying scent of expensive perfume. The International Energy Summit was the most important business gathering of the year, a convergence of power and wealth that would shape the future of the continent. Three years ago, I would have commanded this room. I would have been its sun, every other celestial body in the glittering ballroom orbiting my power, my influence. Tonight, I was a black hole, a collapsed star, sitting alone in a forgotten corner, my presence so cold and so bleak that it repelled the very light and warmth around me.

I had changed. The proud, arrogant Alpha who had believed the world bent to his will was gone, replaced by this gaunt, haunted stranger. I saw him in the dark reflection of my whiskey glass—a man with deep shadows under his eyes and a permanent, weary tension etched into his jaw. The years had stripped the flesh from my bones and the warmth from my soul, leaving only a cold, hard shell of duty and regret.

Pack members and business rivals alike had tried to approach me earlier in the evening. A hopeful word, a sycophantic smile, a probe for weakness. I had dispatched them all with a single, dead-eyed stare that promised nothing but a chilling, empty void. Now, they left me alone, a king in self-imposed exile, watching the peacocks of the corporate world preen and posture from the shadows.

The low murmur of the ballroom suddenly intensified, a wave of palpable excitement, of anticipation, rippling through the crowd. The guest of honor, the evening's great mystery, was about to arrive. All I had heard for weeks were the whispers, the rumors that flew on the winds of international finance. A new power had risen in the east, a financial juggernaut known as Vance Capital, led by a reclusive, brilliant genius named Killian Vance. But it was his lead strategist, the architect of their meteoric, borderline terrifying rise, who was the true enigma. They called her ‘Siren'. They said she was a ghost, a legend, a woman who could dismantle empires with a single, elegant business plan.

I took a slow sip of my whiskey, the amber liquid burning a familiar path down my throat. The name meant nothing to me. Another ambitious player in the great game. It was of no consequence. My world had shrunk to the size of the hollow space in my chest.

But it was not the woman I had broken, the wife I had tormented and driven away. The fragile, weeping Luna was gone, a ghost of a memory. The woman walking into the ballroom was a goddess forged in ice and starlight. A gown of liquid silver, as sleek and sharp as a blade, clung to a figure that was leaner, harder, more dangerous than I remembered. Her hair, that same silver-blonde that haunted my every dream, was swept up in an elegant, severe style that exposed the proud, defiant line of her neck. Her face was a masterpiece of cold, beautiful control, her makeup flawless, her lips curved in a polite, distant smile that held no warmth, no welcome, no feeling at all.

And her eyes… By the ancestors, her eyes. The soft, gentle gray I remembered, the eyes that had once looked at me with such adoration, were gone. They were replaced by the chilling, clear-eyed gaze of a queen who had seen the bottom of the abyss and had clawed her way back out, stronger, colder, and more terrible than before.

She didn't just enter the room. She took it. The ambient light seemed to bend toward her, the sound of the room dipping in deference to her silent, immense power. This was not Seraphina Thorne, the broken Luna of the Blackwood pack. This was Siren. And she was magnificent.