Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 47

POV: Seraphina

I drifted back to consciousness on a tide of pain, the sharp, sterile scent of antiseptic stinging my nostrils. This wasn't the silk and down of my prison at the manor. The ceiling above me was corrugated metal, cold and impersonal. A coarse but clean blanket was tucked around my body, and the steady, rhythmic beeping of medical monitors was the only sound in the dimly lit space. An IV line snaked into my arm, a lifeline I felt I didn't deserve.

My first conscious movement was a pilgrimage. My hand, feeling heavy and disconnected from my body, moved with a will of its own, traveling down to my stomach.

It was flat. Devastatingly, heartbreakingly flat. The subtle, hopeful curve was gone. The warmth, the faint, secret presence that had become the center of my universe, had vanished. My baby was gone. The knowledge wasn't a sharp blade; it was a dull, grinding stone, pulverizing what was left of my heart into dust. Tears, hot and silent, began to flow from the corners of my eyes, soaking the rough pillowcase. I made no sound. There were no sounds left in me. This was a silent funeral for the child I would never hold, and for the woman I used to be.

"Sera."

The voice cut through the fog of my grief. I turned my head, the movement a colossal effort. My brother, Jax, was sitting in a chair beside my bed, a silent, granite sentinel. His face was a thundercloud, darker and more terrifying than any storm I had ever seen. The sheer force of his controlled rage seemed to thin the very air in the room, making it hard to breathe.

"You're awake," he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. He reached out, his calloused thumb gently wiping a tear from my cheek. It was a gesture of impossible softness from a man who currently looked like he could tear the world apart with his bare hands. "The medical team has stabilized you. You lost a lot of blood, but you'll live."

You'll live. The words were a cruel joke, a life sentence to a world that was now empty.

"It must have been a Thorne operative!" Sylvie clung to my arm, her voice a soothing balm that for the first time, felt like an irritant. She was trying to spin the narrative, to shape this chaos into a simple story of betrayal. "They must have been planning this for weeks! This is an abduction, Damian, an act of war!"

But her words were just noise, fading into the background of the maelstrom in my mind. The tearing pain in my soul, the visceral image of that blood-soaked bed… Seraphina was hurt. Badly hurt. And she was gone. Those were the only two facts that mattered.

My only thought, my only primal, driving need, was to find her. Now.

I watched my best tracking teams return, one after another, their heads bowed in failure, their reports a litany of ghosts and dead ends. And with each failure, the nameless panic in my chest grew into a suffocating monster, squeezing the air from my lungs.