Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 106

POV: Damian

Sleep was a distant, mocking luxury. I stood on the cold stone of the hotel terrace, the ghost of Seraphina's indifferent gaze burned onto the back of my eyelids. The city lights below blurred into a meaningless smear of color. The humiliation from the ballroom was a physical thing, a sickness coiling in my gut. I had been dismissed, erased, by the one person whose opinion, I was horrified to realize, still mattered more than any other.

To quell the storm of useless, churning emotion, I retreated to the sterile silence of the suite's study. Work. That was the only anesthetic I had left. I forced myself to sit, to focus on the sheaf of financial reports and strategic proposals related to tomorrow's final bid. I needed to be sharp, to be the ruthless Alpha they all expected. I needed to win. A victory tomorrow would be a balm, however small, on the gaping wound she had inflicted tonight.

My eyes scanned the dense text, but the words were just black marks on a white page. My mind kept drifting, snagging on the memory of her smile—the real one, the one she had given to Vance.

Frustrated, I shoved the current proposal aside and pulled out a stack of older files, needing something to distract me, something to ground me in the familiar world of my past victories. My fingers brushed against a thick, dust-covered folder labeled "Southern Ridge Mines Acquisition – Year 3 Post-Exile."

The memory, sharp and bitter, rose unbidden. It had been one of my first major strategic defeats in years. The Southern Ridge was rich in rare earth minerals, a key component in new energy technologies. I had spent months courting the owning pack, negotiating a deal. Everything was set. We were days from signing.

Then, out of nowhere, a ghost had appeared. A mysterious, unknown overseas consortium, with no history and seemingly infinite funds, had entered the bidding at the eleventh hour. Their offer wasn't just generous; it was insane. They offered triple the market value, a price so high it guaranteed a decade of losses. It was a suicidal, scorched-earth tactic, the move of a madman who cared nothing for profit. I had dismissed them as such and had refused to be drawn into a bidding war with a lunatic. They had won the mines, and I had been left with nothing but a lingering sense of bewilderment.

"This isn't Jax," I whispered to the empty, silent room. "He has the rage, but not the mind for this. He's a soldier, not a strategist."

A cold sweat broke out on my brow. For three years, I had been fighting a war on a front of my own imagining, parrying the clumsy thrusts of a grieving brother. But the real war, the invisible war, had been happening elsewhere, in my balance sheets and my boardrooms.

And all this time, a phantom, an unseen hand, had been guiding the blade to my throat.