Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 76

POV: Damian

Time seemed to stutter, to fracture into a million sharp-edged shards of horror. One moment, the obsidian dagger was a sliver of darkness in the Healer's raised hand; the next, it was buried to the hilt in the flesh of my wife's neck. The silver light of our mate mark, the sacred symbol of our union that had pulsed with a faint, resentful energy for years, didn't just fade. It imploded, consumed by the unnatural darkness of the blade in a violent, silent scream of dying light.

And then, the agony hit me.

It was not a pain of the body. It was a spiritual evisceration. The bond, that constant, subconscious connection that had linked my soul to hers since the day we were mated, was not just cut—it was ripped out by the roots. A scream of pure, animalistic agony was torn from my throat, a sound unlike any I had ever made, raw and broken. It felt as if a vital organ had been violently torn from my chest, leaving a gaping, bleeding void where it had once been.

My wolf, the powerful, indomitable beast that was the core of my being, howled in silent, spiritual torment. The sudden absence of her presence, of Seraphina's wolf, was a shock so profound it sent my entire system into revolt. The strength fled my limbs. The world dissolved into a nauseating, gray blur. The shift back to my human form was not a choice; it was a violent, uncontrolled collapse. My bones cracked and reset with jarring force, and I hit the blood-soaked stones of the altar on my hands and knees.

A violent retch shook my body, and I vomited not food, but blood, hot and coppery, onto the ancient stone. The place where the bond had lived was now a hollow, echoing chasm of pure nothingness. The constant, familiar hum of her presence in the back of my mind—a sensation I had taken for granted, ignored, and even resented—was gone. And its absence was a silence so absolute, so deafening, it was a torture worse than any physical wound.

The last of my strength, the last of my will that had been focused solely on enduring the ritual, evaporated. The world went dark at the edges. The torches of the altar blurred into streaks of light. My body, which had been held rigid by the ritual's power, went limp.

I felt myself falling backward, into the abyss of exhaustion, the cold stone of the altar rising up to meet me.