Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 77

POV: Seraphina

I didn't hit the stone. Strong arms, as solid and dependable as the mountains of my homeland, caught me, pulling me back from the brink of unconsciousness. Jax. He half-carried, half-dragged me from the altar, his body a solid, living shield between me and the kneeling, broken figure of the man who was now a stranger to me. I could hear Damian's ragged, pained gasps, the sounds of a man drowning in a sea of his own making, and the sound stirred nothing in me.

"Is it done?" Jax whispered, his voice rough with a mixture of fear and awe. He looked down at the bleeding, ritualistically carved wound on my neck, which Morwen, the Healer, was already tending to with a practiced, urgent hand, pressing a poultice of herbs against the raw flesh. The stinging was a distant, unimportant sensation.

I simply nodded, leaning against him, the exhaustion a physical weight that threatened to pull me under. My body felt hollowed out, but my spirit felt… light. Unburdened.

Damian staggered to his feet. His face was pale, his eyes wild with a confusion and a pain he clearly didn't understand. The arrogant, controlled Alpha was gone, replaced by a wounded, cornered beast. He stared at me, not with the possessive fury of a husband, but with the terrified disbelief of someone seeing a ghost.

"What did you do to her?" he roared at Jax, his voice cracking with a pain he couldn't comprehend. He pointed a trembling finger at me, as if I were a thing, an object that had been tampered with, broken.

The sound of his voice, no longer connected to me by any spiritual thread, was just a noise in the air. It held no power, no resonance in the quiet space of my soul. I pushed myself away from Jax's supporting arm, my legs shaky but holding. I stood on my own two feet, free.

"From this day forward, Damian Blackwood," I said, my words cutting through the tense silence of the clearing, "there is nothing between us."

I watched the words hit him. I saw the understanding, and the absolute devastation that followed, crash over his face. He flinched back as if I had physically struck him, a strangled sound catching in his throat.

This was not an attack. It was a judgment. And it was final.