Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 289: Serial events

Ethan knew that hospitals never slept. They simply shifted tone. Night enveloped the building, but inside everything remained too bright, too clean, and too carefully controlled, the silence broken only by the soft rhythm of monitors, the muted hurry of footsteps, and the occasional distant voice as staff dealt with emergencies that refused to respect the hour. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Ethan sat in one of the plastic chairs outside the emergency ward, hands loosely folded, the memory of red water and cold skin lingering with uncomfortable clarity even though he had scrubbed his arms until they were raw. People had come and gone around him. Someone had handed him a cup of water, someone else had thanked him for what he had done, and he had replied automatically, his voice functional while his mind stayed fixed somewhere between the hotel bathroom and the present moment.

He stood the moment a physician approached.

"Mr. Miller?" the doctor asked gently.

"Yes."

"Maverick Stuart is stable," the physician said, and those words alone unlocked something tight in Ethan’s lungs. "The situation was dangerous, with severe blood loss and hypothermia, but we were able to keep him stable. He’s sedated, monitored, and responding to treatment."

Ethan nodded slowly. It wasn’t triumph. It wasn’t relief in the comfortable sense. It was simply the release of the immediate terror that Maverick might not have made it.

"There’s something else," the doctor continued, measured and careful, with the tone of someone who had delivered truths like this too often. "This wasn’t a suicide attempt. The injuries don’t match that scenario. The wound pattern, depth, and angle indicate external force. Someone else did this and attempted to make it look otherwise."

The words didn’t surprise Ethan so much as align with everything his instincts had already settled on. "Has his family been contacted?" he asked.

"They’re on their way. When he wakes, keep things simple, brief, and be calm. His body will recover, but trauma rarely stays in the body alone." The doctor hesitated just long enough to acknowledge the weight of that, then rested a reassuring hand on Ethan’s shoulder before leaving him with that truth.

When Ethan turned, he noticed he wasn’t alone.

A man waited a little down the corridor, posture straight, expression unreadable, and presence odd without being intrusive. He didn’t wear a uniform, but the badge on his belt and the quiet attention in his eyes spoke of someone used to stepping into situations like this and untangling what people tried to hide.

"Mr. Miller?" he said when Ethan approached.

"Yes."

"Detective Albrecht." He didn’t extend a hand. "If you feel capable, I’d like to talk through what you found. The sooner we establish clear details, the better."

Ethan didn’t feel fine. But he felt functional, and that would have to be enough. "We can talk."

They moved into a consultation room with plain walls, soft lighting, a table, and two chairs. The distant hum of ventilation filled the silence while the world outside continued with its relentless emergencies. The detective listened to Ethan, but the attention he lent to every word made it clear that this wasn’t routine to him either.

"Start with what didn’t feel right," Albrecht said, his voice even. "Not only what you saw... what struck you as wrong."

So Ethan did.

He spoke about the hotel room and how it hadn’t felt abandoned or chaotic or lived in, but paused, like someone had pressed stop on a moment mid-motion. He described Leon’s jacket folded neatly, his glasses left behind, and the faint sense of interrupted intention. He explained the silence, not as absence, but as something weighted and unnatural.

Then he talked about the bathroom, and the detective didn’t interrupt while he walked him through it. Maverick’s condition, the blood coloring the water, the breath that came too shallow and too weak, the chill of someone sitting in cold water far too long.

"And Leon?" Albrecht finally asked.

"Gone," Ethan replied, firm in a way that came from certainty rather than calm. "It might be far-fetched, but I think whoever did that to Maverick, they took Leon."

Albrecht didn’t answer right away. He studied Ethan with that still, evaluating look, as if he were deciding just how much truth to open at once. When he finally spoke, it was something Ethan wished to never hear again.

"It isn’t far-fetched," he said quietly. "And unfortunately, it isn’t new."

Ethan straightened slightly, the room seeming to focus around that single sentence.

The detective folded his arms loosely, as if he were bracing himself before laying it out. "This... pattern didn’t start tonight. Over the last few years, bonded omegas have gone missing under circumstances that never made sense. They vanished from secured spaces. They vanished without witnesses. They vanished from situations that should have protected them. There was almost always medical involvement in the scene somehow. Hospital stays. Drugging. Fake accidents. In two cases, staged suicides." His voice stayed carefully level, but it was not indifferent. "None of them matched self-harm. All of them pointed toward careful, deliberate removal."

Ethan’s throat tightened.

"You’re telling me," he said slowly, "that this has been happening, and no one stopped it."

Albrecht didn’t flinch. "We tried. There were investigations. Pressure from families. Private inquiries. Some nations denied it outright. Some handled cases quietly to avoid political fallout. Others dismissed them as isolated tragedies. Then... everything stopped. No new disappearances for over a year. We thought, with some of us hoping that it meant the network dissolved, or someone died, or the operation collapsed."

"Until tonight," Ethan finished.

"Yes." The word was simple and too heavy for its size. "Until Leon Stuart."

The silence that followed was a weight settling into the room, into the air, and into Ethan’s bones.

"Why bonded omegas?" he asked eventually, his voice quieter now, because the alternative to asking was letting his mind fill in something uglier. "Why specifically bonded ones?"

Albrecht’s jaw worked for a moment, as if he had already had this conversation too many times and never once liked it.

"You should speak with His Grace, Grand Duke Fitzgeralt."

"Oh, for fuck’s sake." Ethan said and let his head fall onto his hands.