Ex-Alpha's Regret: Siren's Comeback novel Chapter 132

POV: Seraphina

Sleep was an impossibility. The storm raged outside, a symphony of howling wind and crashing waves that seemed to echo the tempest in my own soul. Each shudder of the reinforced glass in my window was a fresh reminder that *he* was here. Trapped. A cancer on my land, a poison in my air.

I paced the length of my suite, from the cold window overlooking the churning sea to the silent fireplace at the other end. My mind was a torture chamber, replaying a highlight reel of my darkest moments. The memory of the blood. The searing, cramping pain that had ripped my child from my body. Damian's cold, indifferent face floating above it all. His presence on my island had given these ghosts a new, terrible life, and they were relentless.

The fragile peace I had built was a ruin, and all that was left was the cold, hard bedrock of my hatred. It was the only thing that felt real, the only thing that had never betrayed me.

Sometime after midnight, there was a soft knock on my door. It was Elara, the young maid whose mother, Martha, had once served me so loyally. Her face was pale with nervousness.

"My lady," she whispered, her eyes wide. "Forgive the intrusion, but… a message arrived for you. From the prisoner."

She held out a folded piece of paper. It was damp, clearly having been smuggled from the port through the driving rain.

My first instinct was to burn it without reading. But a kind of morbid, self-punishing curiosity took over. What final, pathetic excuse could he possibly offer now? I took the note from her trembling hand.

His handwriting was a mess, a desperate, sloping scrawl. The words themselves were a testament to the profound, unbreachable chasm of his delusion.

And he remembered it as *perfect*.

He hadn't just broken my heart. He hadn't even been present for the true beginning of its destruction. His ignorance was more insulting than his cruelty had ever been.

The cold, icy armor I had worn for three years, the carefully constructed facade of the unfeeling queen, didn't just crack. It exploded. It vaporized in a sudden, volcanic eruption of pure, incandescent rage. The pain and grief I had held inside for so long, the unspeakable trauma I had never allowed myself to fully process, all of it finally, finally ignited.

I crushed the note in my fist, the paper becoming a damp, pathetic ball in my palm. I stormed past the terrified maid, my only thought to get to him, to wipe that pathetic, hopeful, ignorant look off his face for all time.