Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 103

POV: Damian

The world was a blur of spinning lights and mocking, pitying faces. I don't remember leaving the ballroom. I just remember the sudden, desperate need for air, the feeling of the walls closing in on me, the crushing weight of a thousand pairs of eyes witnessing my utter and complete humiliation. I found myself on a deserted stone terrace, the cool night air a shock against my feverish skin. I gripped the cold, unforgiving stone of the balustrade, my knuckles white, and tried to breathe, but my lungs refused to cooperate.

She had looked at me like I was nothing. After three years of a living hell that I had endured solely with the memory of her at its center, she had looked at me and seen nothing. A stranger. An inconvenience.

The last three years crashed down on me, a tidal wave of memory and regret. It had all started in the cold, gray dawn after the battle at the altar, after she had vanished into the mist. My frantic, desperate search had yielded nothing but that single, mud-caked wedding ring. It was the first clue that this was more than just a flight. It was a final, absolute severing of our life together.

But my pride, my arrogance, my Alpha ego, wouldn't let me accept it. The bond between a mated pair was sacred, eternal. It could be strained, it could be weakened, but it could not be broken. I refused to believe that her will could triumph over the laws of our nature.

Desperate for a solution, I had sought out the most powerful, and most reclusive, soul-weaver on the continent, an ancient she-wolf who lived in a secluded hut in the heart of the Whispering Mountains. I had offered her a fortune, a king's ransom, to find the frayed thread of my mate bond and magically re-forge it, to bind Seraphina's soul back to mine, whether she willed it or not.

I remember standing in her smoke-filled hut, the air thick with the scent of burning herbs and ancient, crackling magic. She had taken my hand, her own as dry and brittle as an autumn leaf, her old, cloudy eyes closing as she reached into the very fabric of my soul. I waited, my heart pounding with a desperate, foolish hope, believing that my wealth and power could fix even this.

When she opened her eyes again, they were filled not with the greed of a mystic about to be paid, but with a profound, soul-deep pity that was a thousand times worse.

Her next words were the ones that had become the cornerstone of my three-year nightmare, the words I heard every time I closed my eyes.

"To survive such a ritual, the supplicant must possess a will so absolute, a resolve so unyielding, that they would truly rather have their soul torn to shreds and scattered to the winds than remain connected to their mate for another second. It is the ultimate act of spiritual renunciation. She did not just leave you, Alpha. She performed a magical suicide of the soul, and was reborn without you. The bond cannot be restored unless she, of her own free will, chooses to forge a new one. And from what I feel in the echoes of your soul… that will never happen."

I stood on that cold terrace, the memory as fresh and as raw as it had been three years ago, and finally, finally accepted the truth in all its horrifying finality. She had chosen an agony worse than death over a single second more of being tied to me.