Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 129

POV: Seraphina

The image of his face on the screen was not a picture. It was a key. It was a cold, iron key that unlocked a lightless, soundless room deep inside my soul, a place I had sealed shut three years ago. And from that room, the ghosts came pouring out.

The sterile smell of the healer's room. The metallic tang of blood in my mouth. The phantom ache in my belly, a hollow, unending grief for a life that never was. The echo of my son's voice, laced with a cruelty he had learned from others. The crushing weight of humiliation. The suffocating helplessness of my imprisonment.

It all came back. Not as memories, but as vivid, visceral sensations. The carefully constructed peace I had built over the last three years, the quiet warmth I had just begun to feel in Killian's presence, it was all a fragile house of cards, and Damian's arrival was the storm that flattened it in an instant.

The hope I had felt felt was the most foolish, dangerous indulgence of all. The budding trust in Killian now seemed like a fatal lapse in judgment. An inner voice, the one that had kept me alive in the darkest of times, was screaming at me now.

*See? This is the price of letting your guard down. This is the lesson. You dared to feel something, you dared to imagine a different life, and the universe immediately sent the monster of your past to drag you back into the nightmare.*

*Alphas are all the same. Their love is possession. Their care is a cage. Their passion is a fire that will always, always burn you.*

I felt myself retreating, pulling every part of my being back inside the fortress. The armor I had begun to shed was now being rebuilt, thicker, colder, and more impenetrable than ever before. I could feel the ice forming around my heart, a blessed, numbing cold that pushed away the pain, the hope, and the man standing beside me in equal measure.

"Seraphina."

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