Nicholas’s POV

I rarely went to the Obsidian Holdings tower after that first afternoon.

Harrison had his orders. The human fixers, the private investigators, the data brokers, and the casino bosses were all deployed. My network was actively tearing the city apart, brick by concrete brick. I had infinite resources, and I was burning through them without a second thought.

But I couldn’t sit in a sterile penthouse office while they worked. It felt too corporate. Too disconnected from the blood and dirt of the streets where she might be hiding.

Instead, I stayed locked inside the massive private estate on the outskirts of the city.

It was a sprawling, heavily secured fortress disguised as a billionaire’s mansion. Harrison had rapidly staffed it with humans to keep it running—chefs, security guards, housekeepers, and assistants. I ignored all of them. I didn’t care about the staff. I didn’t care about the lavish furnishings. I only cared about the ringing of my encrypted phone.

I spent my days pacing the length of the master suite.

The waiting was a unique, refined kind of physical agony. My wolf clawed endlessly at my ribs. He was restless, pacing back and forth in the dark corners of my mind. He wanted to be out on the streets. He wanted to hunt. He wanted to track our mate through the alleys and the subway stations with his own teeth and claws.

But the human city was too chaotic. Millions of scents. Millions of heartbeats. The mate bond was a thin, vibrating wire in my chest—it told me she was close, but it couldn’t give me a street address. I had to rely on the humans to find her.

And so, I waited.

I drank expensive amber whiskey that tasted like ash on my tongue. I stared at the blank walls. I barely ate.

When the sheer, bone-crushing exhaustion finally caught up with me, it didn’t bring peace. Sleep was just another battlefield.

I crashed heavily on the massive king-sized bed. I didn’t bother taking off my dark clothes. The heavy blackout curtains were drawn shut, plunging the room into absolute, suffocating darkness.

My dreams were violent and chaotic. I saw Irina’s terrified face in the dungeon. I saw the blood on the floor of the medical wing. I heard the phantom cry of a child I had never even met. I reached for her in the dark, but my fingers only grasped empty air. She was always running. I was always the monster chasing her.

I woke up with a violent jolt.

My chest heaved. I was covered in a cold, uncomfortable sweat. The room was mostly dark, save for a thin, pale sliver of daylight creeping through a crack in the heavy curtains. My head pounded with a vicious, dull ache from the whiskey and the lack of real rest.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear the heavy, disorienting fog from my brain.

That was when I saw it.

A silhouette.

Someone was standing right next to the edge of my bed.

My breath caught sharply in my throat. My heart completely stopped beating.

It was a woman. She had a small, slender frame. The faint sliver of daylight caught the top of her head, illuminating long, pale blonde hair. She was holding something in her hands, her head bowed slightly, her shoulders hunched forward in that quiet, submissive posture I knew better than my own reflection.

The scent of rain and clean earth wasn’t there, but my groggy, desperate brain didn’t care. My wolf surged forward, howling with a sudden, blinding hope.

She was here. She had come back to me.

"Irina?" I breathed.

My voice was a rough, broken rasp. It didn’t sound like the CEO of a global empire. It didn’t sound like the Alpha King. It sounded like a starving, desperate man.

The woman jumped violently. She spun around, clearly terrified that I was awake.

"Nicholas?" she whispered.

The name hung in the quiet room. Her voice was shaking, high-pitched, and trembling with fear.

I didn’t even process the sound of her voice. I didn’t care that she hadn’t called me ’Sir’ or ’Mr. Nicholas’. I only cared that she was standing within my reach.

I lunged forward.

My large hand shot out and clamped firmly around her slender wrist.

She gasped loudly. The moment my fingers wrapped around her skin, she yanked her arm back. She shrank away from me, her entire body cowering instinctively to avoid a strike.

That flinch.

That terrified, automatic flinch.

It was exactly how Irina used to react every single time I moved too fast in the Greystone palace. It was the physical manifestation of all her trauma, playing out right in front of me. The familiarity of that flinch bypassed all of my logic. It shattered the last remaining wall of my self-control.

"No," I growled softly, refusing to let her pull away.

I tightened my grip on her wrist and yanked her forward with a massive surge of strength. She let out a short, terrified scream as I pulled her off balance. She collapsed directly onto the mattress, and I instantly wrapped both of my arms around her.

I pulled her tight against my chest. I buried my face in the crook of her neck, desperately inhaling, waiting for the mate bond to flare. Waiting for the sweet, intoxicating scent of my wife. Waiting for the missing piece of my soul to finally click back into place.

But the bond stayed completely silent.

The scent hit my nose.

It wasn’t rain. It wasn’t clean earth.

It was cheap floral perfume. It was artificial vanilla. It was the sharp, sour tang of pure human sweat and sheer, unadulterated human terror.

My entire body froze. The blood in my veins instantly turned to ice.

I opened my eyes.

I looked down at the woman currently trembling and sobbing in my arms.

She had blonde hair. She had a slender frame. But the face staring back at me was completely wrong. The eyes were brown, not that beautiful, cloudy blue. She was wearing a crisp, black-and-white uniform. A feather duster and a stack of clean towels were scattered across the floor where she had dropped them.

She was a maid.

Just a human maid that Harrison had hired to clean the estate.

She had probably slipped into the master suite, assuming the reclusive CEO was deeply asleep, just trying to do her job. And she had whispered my first name in sheer, paralyzing shock when the terrifying boss she had only heard rumors about suddenly grabbed her in the dark. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The realization crashed into me like a freight train.

It wasn’t her.

It wasn’t Irina.

The desperate, fleeting second of hope evaporated, leaving behind a black, gaping void of grief. And then, the grief instantly, violently mutated into blinding, explosive rage.

My wolf snarled viciously. The disappointment was too sharp. The pain was too deep. I couldn’t handle it. I needed to destroy something.

I shoved her away from me.

I pushed her so hard she tumbled off the edge of the mattress and hit the hardwood floor with a heavy thud.

"Ah!" she cried out, scrambling frantically backward until her back hit the wall. She curled her knees to her chest, openly weeping, absolutely certain that she was about to die.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

My alpha aura exploded into the room. It was a suffocating, crushing physical weight. The glass lamps on the nightstands actually rattled from the sheer pressure of my fury. My eyes bled into pitch black. I looked down at the trembling, sobbing human on the floor, and I didn’t feel a single ounce of pity.

She wasn’t my mate. She was an imposter. A cruel, sickening trick played by my own desperate mind.

I pointed a shaking finger at the heavy oak door.

"Get out!" I roared, my voice vibrating the walls and rattling the windows of the estate. "Get out!"

The maid scrambled to her feet. She didn’t even try to pick up her towels. She slipped on the hardwood floor, sobbing hysterically as she clawed at the door handle, desperate to escape the monster in the room.

She threw the door open and sprinted down the hallway.

I stood alone in the dark room, my chest heaving, my hands curled into tight, shaking fists. The silence rushed back in, mocking me. The empty bed mocked me.

I ripped the heavy lamp off the nightstand and hurled it across the room. It smashed against the wall, shattering into a thousand useless pieces.

"No light-haired maids are allowed in this building ever again!"