Day by day, Damien’s powerful frame grew gaunt, hollowed by grief and desperate searching.
After my disappearance, laughter died in the Northern Territory. Their Alpha King became a ghost, wandering the halls with dead eyes.
Pack duties lay abandoned as he traveled obsessively across Europe. From London’s foggy streets to Paris’s glittering lights, Rome’s ancient alleys to Berlin’s cold corridors – he searched everywhere.
But even an Alpha King’s considerable power had limits.
In Prague, he traded a year of his life force to a withered witch for a tracking spell.
In Vienna, another witch took a portion of his Alpha strength for a scrying ritual.
Moscow’s most feared magical practitioner drained half his remaining power for a single glimpse of my future.
None of it worked.
Between searches, he drowned himself in wolfsbane–laced whiskey, stumbling through pack territories in a drunken haze.
Pack members whispered as he passed, their Alpha reduced to this broken shell.
When the alcohol couldn’t numb his pain, he descended to the punishment caves where Emily was held.
Her screams echoed through the tunnels as he took out his rage on her already broken body.
“Where is she?” he would demand, though Emily couldn’t possibly know.
“What else did you say to her? What else did you do?”
Soon Emily was barely recognizable, her once–beautiful face a mass of scars.
But torturing her brought him no peace.
Month by month, his Alpha power drained away- sacrificed to witches or lost to his growing madness.
The pack felt it. Their Alpha was failing.
That final day, Damien locked himself in his private quarters, too weak to even stand properly.
His hands trembled violently as he opened the divorce papers I’d left, now worn from
1/3
constant handling.
”
