my fated alpha mate

Chapter 8: found at last

Ethan's POV

The room fell into a tense, uneasy silence the moment I stepped through the shattered doorway, my presence alone enough to freeze everyone in place. It was Gregory who finally found his voice, stepping forward with a strained, ingratiating smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"Mr. Ethan," he said, bowing slightly at the waist, his tone dripping with forced hospitality. "What an honor. What brings you to our hospital at this hour?"

I didn't answer him. My eyes were already moving past him, sweeping across the room, cataloguing every detail — the overturned tray of surgical instruments, the faint red marks visible on his palm, the way the nurses pressed themselves against the far wall as though trying to disappear into it entirely.

And in the corner, half-hidden behind a haphazard pile of linens and a rolling hospital bed shoved out of place, I could still hear it. That faint, muffled sound. A voice trying desperately to break through fabric and silence.

I started toward it, my steps unhurried but deliberate, every instinct in me narrowing to that single point in the room. I had barely taken three strides before Lyra rushed forward, throwing her arms around me and pressing herself against my chest before I could react.

"Mr. Ethan," she breathed, tilting her face up toward mine with wide, adoring eyes. "I've admired you for so long. I never imagined I'd actually get the chance to meet you like this — it feels like fate, doesn't it?"

I stood rigid, every muscle in my body tensing with irritation, but before I could pry her off me, an older woman stepped forward as well — Selena Hawthorne, if I recalled correctly from the file Xavier had compiled on the Gregory household. Mia's stepmother.

"Lyra is my daughter," she said proudly, gesturing toward the girl still clinging to my arm. "Well-mannered, beautiful, raised with the finest values a young woman could have." Her smile widened, though there was something calculating behind it, something that made my skin crawl. "Did you come all this way just to see her, Mr. Ethan? It's such a shame we weren't able to attend your banquet last time — we would have loved the opportunity to introduce ourselves properly."

"Not Lyra," I said flatly, my patience already wearing dangerously thin.

I reached up and pulled Lyra's arms away from me, more forcefully than I probably needed to, and stepped back. "Back off," I said, my voice low and cold enough that even she seemed to falter for half a second.

But she recovered quickly, spreading her arms wide in front of me as though she could physically block my path toward the corner of the room, her expression shifting into something pleading, almost desperate.

"Mr. Ethan, won't you stay just a little longer?" she asked, her voice syrupy sweet. "We haven't even had the chance to get to know one another yet. I promise, if you gave me the opportunity, you'd find I have so much more to offer than you might expect."

I felt the wolf inside me snarl with impatience, every second she spent standing between me and that corner of the room feeling like an eternity. I fixed her with a look I usually reserved for enemies on the battlefield, not simpering socialites in hospital corridors.

"I'm only going to ask you just once." I said, each word measured and deliberate. "Where is Mia?"

For the briefest moment, something flickered across her face — a flash of panic, quickly smoothed over into practiced confusion. "I'm sorry, Mr. Ethan, I think you might have the wrong name," she said, tilting her head innocently. "I only have a stepsister with that name, and she's... well, she's not someone worth your time. Trust me."

That was when I heard it again — a muffled, frantic sound coming from behind the pile of linens shoved into the corner, followed by the unmistakable creak of a hospital bed frame shifting under someone's struggling weight.

Lyra's eyes darted toward the corner in obvious alarm, and before I could take another step, she spun on her heel and hurried toward the pile of covers, yanking the fabric tighter, adjusting it as though smoothing out a wrinkled bedsheet.

"Mr. Ethan, there's nothing behind that curtain," she said quickly, a little too quickly, her voice climbing half an octave higher than before. "It's just spare linens — the room's a little disorganized, that's all. You know how hospitals can be."

I felt something inside me go very, very still. The kind of stillness that came right before the storm.

"Move aside," I said.

She didn't. She stood there, arms half-raised, her smile faltering into something closer to a grimace, clearly trying to decide whether defiance or compliance would serve her better in that moment. I didn't give her the chance to choose. I stepped past her, reached out, and drew back the pile of linens covering the bed in the corner with one sharp pull.

And there she was.

Mia lay curled on her side atop the hospital bed, her wrists and ankles bound tightly with rope, a strip of cloth tied cruelly across her mouth to muffle any sound she tried to make. Her eyes were wide, glassy with tears, red-rimmed from crying, and the moment the fabric fell away and light hit her face, I watched something in her expression crack open — relief, disbelief, and something that looked dangerously close to hope, all at once.

For a moment, I couldn't move. I simply stood there, staring down at her, at the rope biting into the soft skin of her wrists, at the faint bruising already forming along her throat in the unmistakable shape of a man's fingers, and something inside me — something ancient, something that had been dormant for years — roared to life all at once.

The wolf surged forward with a violence I hadn't felt in longer than I could remember, every instinct in me screaming to tear apart anyone who had dared to lay a hand on her.