The only proof she’d ever existed here was the warm vanilla scent of her, lingering in the air.
I staggered back a step, yanked my phone from my pocket, and dialed her number with shaking fingers.
One ring. Two. Three.
We're sorry. The person you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try your call again later.
The automated voice sliced through me, cold and final. I tried again—same message.
“Fuck,” I hissed under my breath, the word ripping out raw and ragged. “Goddamn it, Isabella, pick up.”
My chest seized, a pain sharp and alien consuming me. My wolf thrashed inside me, violent and furious, every movement a hammering reminder of what I’d lost. The pain wasn’t just in my chest; it was everywhere, spreading through my bones, my blood, my very senses.
I sank to the floor, clutching my chest as the agony intensified. The back of my eyelids burned. I had never known despair like this. And I knew, with a bone-deep clarity, that the emptiness would not fade.
Not until I found her.
Chapter Six
Dimitri’s POV
Something in me had gone quiet.
In the last three months since Isabella’s disappearance, my wolf had gone still. Not dead, not gone…just absent. Like he’d turned his back on me and walked into some dark corner of my mind I couldn’t reach.
“Congratulations, son! Cheers to many more billion-dollar deals!”
My mother’s voice cut through my haze. Glasses clinked around the room, and laughter filled the air. I raised my own glass automatically, a muscle memory of celebration, though I couldn’t remember what exactly we were celebrating anymore. The new merger? The new acquisition? It all blurred together.
I downed my glass of whiskey, welcoming the burn.
For weeks now, I’d been running on instinct—wake, work, sign, seal, deliver. The perfect Alpha. The world applauded, investors smiled, my mother hosted endless parties to “celebrate our pack’s progress”.
And through it all, my wolf stayed silent.
At first, I thought it was grief. Then I thought it was punishment.
Now, I wasn’t sure what it was.
I’d tried to call to him, to that deep place where he usually stirred, but every attempt was met with silence. No answering growl. No surge of power under my skin. Just emptiness.
I moved to the minibar in the living room and refilled my glass with vodka. I closed the cabinet, and turned around.
That’s when I saw him.
Leonard Capper stood near the doorway, his gray eyes scanning the room before landing on me. To everyone else in this room—my mother, Selene, even Edmund—he was just another business associate, a security consultant I’d hired to audit Ravencrest Global’s corporate protections.
Only I knew the truth.
Edmund had brought Leonard Capper on board after his own searches for Isabella came up empty. If anyone in Garnia could uncover her, it would be Edmund—meticulous, relentless, the best at due diligence. Yet even he had hit a dead end. That was how impossible this had become. And that was why he’d hired Leonard Capper, ex-CIA, twenty years in intelligence, now the finest private investigator the East Coast could buy.
I led Leonard to my study, the one place in this mansion I was certain wasn’t being monitored. I hadn’t set foot in here since the Alpha ceremony three months ago.
The moment I opened the door, her scent hit me.
Since that night—the night we’d made love on the chaise, the night she’d trusted me with her virginity, the night I’d promised to protect her—her scent had clung to this room like an indelible mark.
I stood frozen in the doorway, my hand pressed against the frame, unable to force myself to step inside.