Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 82

POV: Damian

The days that followed were a special kind of hell. The manor was a tomb, and I was its restless, tormented ghost. I barely ate. I didn't sleep. I spent my hours pacing the halls, haunted by the crushing, absolute silence in my soul. Every report from my spies and trackers was the same: nothing. It was as if she, her brother, and their entire loyalist faction had simply stepped off the edge of the world.

Sylvie tried to comfort me. She would bring me food I didn't eat, whisper soothing words I didn't hear. Her touch, which had once been a pleasant distraction, now felt like an irritating scrape against a raw nerve. Her presence was a constant, cloying reminder of the choices I had made, of the hollow victory she represented.

On the fifth day, the lead tracker from the southern territories returned. He was a grizzled, old wolf, the best I had, and his face was a mask of defeat. He knelt before me in the throne room, his head bowed.

"Alpha," he said, his voice heavy with failure. "We found nothing. No trail, no scent, no whispers. They are gone."

"Nothing?" I asked, my voice a dead, hollow thing.

"One thing, Alpha." He reached into a leather pouch at his belt and produced a small, mud-caked object, which he placed carefully on a piece of clean silk.

It was her wedding ring. The simple gold band I had placed on her finger five years ago. It was cold and lifeless, stripped of her warmth, a perfect, glittering circle of my failure. It had been found half-buried in the sand on a remote, windswept beach at the very edge of the continent, a place where the great ships set sail for the unknown lands across the sea. She had not lost it. She had discarded it. It was a final, deliberate message. An exclamation point at the end of her judgment.

Sylvie swept in, a vision of maternal concern. She scooped Nico into her arms, murmuring soothing nonsense into his hair. "Shhh, my sweet prince, it's not your father's fault. Don't say such things."

She looked at me over his head, her eyes filled with a practiced, gentle sympathy. "Don't listen to him, Damian," she whispered. "He's just a child. He's upset. Seraphina chose to leave. This isn't on you."

Her comfort was a lie, and for the first time, I heard it as such. I looked from her perfectly composed face to my son's tear-streaked, hating glare, and I felt the carefully constructed world I had built for myself begin to crack at the foundations.