Chapter 552 DESTRUCTION (BONUS - 3)

DAMIAN’S POV

“My, my, Damian,” Astrid tutted, eyeing me with what an obtuse would have called sympathy but I knew to be poorly disguised amusement, “you’ve definitely seen better days.”

My knuckles blanched as I strangled the armrests, the leather protesting beneath my grip. “I did not come here to be mocked, Volker.”

She smirked, leaning back in her plush leather seat. “No, Rooke, you came here to hide.”

I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep my fangs from sliding out. The pressure was the only thing holding me together.

Hide. As if I were prey. As if I were a child cowering under the bed, terrified of imaginary monsters.

Except my monsters weren’t imaginary.

No, Kieran and Seraphina Blackthorne were real—as real as the scent of cardamom and vanilla that had clung to Seraphina on that cursed island—and they’d stolen from me and driven me underground like a fucking rat.

Their irksome alliance had set up surveillance on everything I owned—hotels, bars, even my most secret, unscrupulous businesses had been uncovered and hounded.

I’d known Catherine and Marcus were ticking time bombs. I’d been amused by the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before they exploded and destroyed each other.

I’d just been too arrogant—perhaps naïve was the better word—to see that they would take me down with them.

I thought I was well removed, distant enough to be entertained, to receive my profits, and not have my clothes stained by the splash of their inevitable mess.

But more than being stained, I was drenched. Their mess was practically dripping off me.

And as a cherry on the cake, losing Mireya had made me foolish. Reckless. I’d transformed into a wild animal on that island, attacking any and everything that moved.

Yet, all that feral vengeance had done was lead me here—cornered and at someone else’s mercy.

I held far fewer cards than the last time I was here, and Astrid knew it. Knew it and reveled in it.

She lounged in her chair as if it were a throne and regarded me as if I were a subject begging for scraps at her feet.

“Tell me, Rooke,” she said, her fingers lightly drumming against the sleek cellphone resting on her desk, “why I shouldn’t call my very good friend, Sera, and let her know you’re here. After all, she returned something precious that I had been searching for. It’s only right to return the favor.”

At the mention of that name, my vision briefly blurred with red-hot rage.

I was a reckoner by nature. I settled my scores, and I fully intended to settle the one I had with Seraphina Blackthorne.

She’d taken the most important thing to me and torn my world apart. I would return the favor if it was the last thing I did.

“Do that,” I ground out, “and you’ll never get the information I promised.”

Astrid’s brow arched, and a surprised laugh fell from her lips.

“Oh, you’re still holding on to that pathetic little trading card?”

“I found Mireya all on my own, but I’m willing to keep my end of the bargain if you...”

Gods, the words were so hard to force out. Asking for help was never my strong suit, and I loathed how often I’d been forced to.

“...if you help me.”

Astrid was silent for a while, her sharp eyes fixed on me with the curiosity of a scientist dissecting a new organism.

I met her gaze unflinchingly. I may have lost a lot—my assets, my credibility, my mate—but I would not surrender the last scraps of my dignity.

Information was all I had left to barter with, and no matter how blasé Astrid acted, I knew there was one secret she would trade the world to possess.

She could feign indifference as well as I could pretend I didn’t need Mireya.

“Tell me what you know,” she said at last, “then I will decide if the information is worth whatever aid you need rendered.”

I shook my head. “I need your word—”

“That is all you will get from me, Rooke,” she cut in, all amusement leached from her voice. “Take it or take your odds running from the alliance for the rest of your life.”

It was my turn to be silent.

A sly smile tugged at Astrid’s lips as her amusement resurfaced. She knew I had next to no bargaining chips. My silence was just a last-ditch effort to claw back a sliver of control.

Fuck. How did I get here?

Mireya, that was how.

She’d drifted into my life like a fragile little leaf carried on the winds of a storm—only to reveal herself as the storm itself.

She ripped a hole into my perfectly curated existence, driving me mad with a possession I couldn’t understand, much less control.

I should have been glad she was gone—yanked out of my grasp, more accurately—but I didn’t know how to function with that hole. No, I needed that void filled.

I would lose everything, but I would not lose her.

“Catherine,” I gritted out.

Astrid cocked her head. “Excuse me?”

“Catherine murdered Esme and Rhysand,” I clarified. “Catherine took little Evelyn.”

Astrid went very, very still. So still, I questioned if she’d heard me at all, if she’d understood my words.

Oh, but she had.

Her eyes went glassy, as if she’d retreated into herself, watching a memory play in her mind’s eye.

Her chest barely rose and fell with breath, and I knew better than to interrupt whatever she was going through.

After what felt like an eternity, her lips moved. The singular word was barely a breath, but the room had gone so quiet it practically echoed: “Proof.”

I almost smiled.

I may have been foolish and arrogant in dealing with Catherine and Marcus, but I never allied myself with unknown elements. I’d done my due diligence on both of them.

I knew how Catherine left her pack, married a wealthy human, and, when he died of “mysterious circumstances”, used her inheritance to build her veritable empire.

I knew the choice she made in her bitter heart when she left her pack: if she could not be accepted as a werewolf, she would be a fearsome witch.

I knew how she sought out the kind couple, Esme and Rhysand. Esme taught witchcraft to the children in her coven and opened her arms and home to Catherine.

When it became clear that, as a half-blood witch, Catherine would never reach the heights she desired, and the witch community was just as welcoming to her as the werewolf community had been—which was not at all—she decided to do the next best thing: raise another powerful witch in her image.

And since she herself couldn’t give birth to a full-blooded witch, she rewarded Esme and Rhysand for their kindness by setting them ablaze in their own home and absconding with their daughter.

I retrieved a flash drive from my pocket and held it up. The sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind Astrid reflected off the silver edge and cast her face in sharp angles.

She stared at the little device as if it were the answer to immortality.

“Proof,” I said. “And guidance.”

“Guidance,” Astrid echoed, her eyes never leaving the drive like a predator tracking its prey.

“To know where she’s going, you have to know where she’s been. Who she’s been. What kind of life she’s lived.”

“She.” Astrid’s words were barely more than little puffs of breath. “Evelyn.”

A pang of something like...maybe not sympathy, but empathy went through me.

Catherine had killed Astrid’s half-sister and brother-in-law and stolen her niece. Evelyn was the last shred of family Astrid had left.

I imagined Astrid’s loss carved a hole in her—a different shape than the one Mireya left in me, but a hollow ache all the same.

We were just two broken souls, stumbling through the dark, desperate to fill the emptiness inside us.

“If this is deceit,” Astrid said in that feather-light voice, “you will beg for the alliance’s punishment, compared to my wrath.”

“It’s not,” I swore. “I have only one more thing to lose, and I will not lose it.”

She held out her hand, palm up. She had still not taken her eyes off the drive. I wasn’t sure she had blinked.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Money? A hideout?”

That would be the smart decision, wouldn’t it? A safe space, resources to keep me hidden from the dogs nipping at my heels while I figured out my next move.

But I’d stopped being smart the day Mireya walked through my door and that connection snapped into place.

“I want what I’ve always wanted,” I said. “Help me find my mate.”

Astrid’s gaze finally broke from the drive. She turned to me and let out an incredulous breath.

“That little Omega will be your destruction, Rooke.”

Mireya’s face appeared in my mind’s eye—the deep chestnut of her hair, the pale grey of her eyes, the tiny dimple in her chin.

And then came everything else: her rare, hesitant smile, the soft cadence of her voice, the silky strands of her hair winding through my fingers, the familiar curve of her body beneath my hands.

The hole in my soul throbbed. No amount of werewolf genes would heal it, not while my mate remained somewhere out of my reach.

It should have unsettled me, the lengths I was willing to go to get her back.

I would burn the world down and sift through its ashes for Mireya.

“Yes,” I mused, almost to myself, “maybe she will be.”

But then again, I was no stranger to destruction.