The Genetic Bride: Alpha's Obsession

Chapter 7: A Clean Slate

SEBASTIAN

A week later, Bella was officially discharged from the underground recovery wings. Callum had finalized his exhaustive battery of neural and physical exams, confidently certifying that her cloned body was perfectly stable, completely recovered, and entirely safe to return home with me.

For the time being, I brought her back to my secluded mansion—the very place where I had once kept her locked away in chains. I intended for this stay to be strictly temporary, as my original plan was to return her to our ancestral pack lands in Blackvale the moment she felt truly grounded and settled within herself.

Yet, as the days bled together, she continued to quietly struggle with the massive, blank spaces in her identity. No matter how hard I tried to suppress my anxiety, a dark, suffocating fear constantly shadowed my mind. I worried endlessly about her delicate neurological state, but more than that, I was terrified that if any fragment of her true past ever managed to claw its way to the surface, she would remember the monster I was and hate me all over again.

The terrifying thought haunted my every waking hour.

Callum had repeatedly assured me that such a psychological relapse was medically impossible. His team had successfully quarantined and erased the neural pathways containing her memories of Riven, along with the brutal tragedy that had concluded her past life. I forced myself to trust Callum’s science. I truly wanted to believe it.

But why did this toxic unease continue to sit heavily in my chest like a block of lead?

I stood quietly by the master bedroom doorway, watching her sleep. She looked entirely too peaceful. Lying there across the silk sheets with the morning sunlight cascading over her skin, her breathing was slow and perfectly steady. She looked like an angel who had never been touched by trauma—as if this historic stone house held no dark shadows, no violent history, and no invisible scars.

I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. Not when she looked so soft, so calm, and completely unburdened by the absolute darkness I was forced to carry every single day.

I had stood in this exact doorway countless times over the last two years. Back then, I was a man driven to the absolute brink of madness—haunted by my desperate choices, poisoned by my own possessiveness, and tormented by her fierce, unyielding resistance to my touch.

But today felt entirely different. The air in the room felt less cruel. It felt almost close to being kind.

Still, a quiet, predatory guilt lived inside me, a constant companion to my heartbeat. I carried the crushing weight of what I had done to her—the horrific truth that she no longer possessed the capacity to remember. There were things I would never be permitted to forget, sins I didn't deserve to be absolved of.

But she… she had been granted a completely clean slate. Perhaps it was a divine mercy that neither of us truly deserved, but I was entirely too selfish to ever give it back.

I took a slow, silent step into the room. She didn’t stir, not even when I sat at the edge of the mattress and gently brushed the pad of my thumb across her flushing cheek. Her skin felt incredibly soft, radiating life beneath my touch.

She's real.

We had been living here for a week now, but there were moments where I still found myself struck by a wave of pure disbelief. I couldn't comprehend that she was actually here, sitting within arm's reach without looking at me with absolute defiance the moment our eyes locked. Her striking forest-green eyes no longer harbored a deep, echoing terror whenever I stepped into her space. And yet, I could still tell when her subconscious mind was secretly warring with itself. Even though she never spoke of her confusion, I saw it clearly in the way her delicate fingers would occasionally twitch in her sleep, or how she would suddenly freeze when a silence stretched too long—as if something primal buried deep within her genetic code was desperately trying to claw its way back into the light.

But she trusted me now. That was the only thing that truly mattered, wasn’t it?

The mattress dipped further under my weight as I leaned over her. She stirred at the movement, her long lashes fluttering open to reveal her clear, beautiful eyes.

She blinked up at me sleepily, a soft, slightly hesitant smile gracing her lips.

“You’re here…” she murmured.

“I’m always here,” I replied softly, my voice laced with absolute devotion.

She reached out from beneath the blankets, her fingers brushing against my hand like a natural instinct.

“How do you feel?” I asked, holding her gaze.

She stretched out her limbs, her eyes wandering curiously around the expansive architecture of the master bedroom. Her brow furrowed slightly, a flicker of confusion crossing her face as if her brain couldn’t quite decide whether the room was entirely new or intimately familiar.

“I feel okay... I think. Just a little tired.” Her gaze drifted past me toward the open balcony, where the distant sea shimmered brilliantly under the morning sun. “This place... it’s incredibly beautiful, Sebastian. Have I been here before?”

“Yes,” I answered quietly, my chest tightening. “A long time ago.”

“I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, a faint trace of frustration in her voice.

I didn’t speak right away. A suffocating tightness gripped my throat, the same paralyzing fear that always seized me whenever her mind accidentally brushed against a memory she wasn’t engineered to recall.

She turned her face back to mine, her eyes searching for my expression. “Was I happy here?”

I looked at her for a long, agonizing moment, swallowing down the bitter truth as I stared into the pure innocence of her face. “You are now, Bella.”

She nodded slowly, as if that singular reassurance was more than enough to satisfy her doubts. Perhaps, for now, it truly was.

“You mentioned that we could eventually go back to Blackvale,” she said after a quiet moment, her fingers lightly tracing the contours of my hand. “I find myself missing them.”

She was referring to my family pack—the people who had loved her fiercely like one of their own, because for all intents and purposes, she was. Bella’s biological parents had been dear friends of my family. When they tragically died in an accident during her childhood, my parents immediately took her into our home, raising her alongside me.

I had been fifteen years old when she arrived, a fragile eight-year-old orphan. But even back then, long before our adult instincts had formed, our ultimate destiny had already been permanently sealed by the Moon Goddess herself. I had loved her from the exact moment she entered my world.

As the years passed, she grew into the most breathtakingly stunning woman I had ever laid eyes upon. When she eventually confessed her dream of moving to Europe to become a professional runway model, my family had supported her career unconditionally, giving her everything she needed to succeed. She started her career early—at just fifteen—and rapidly ascended to global fame.

Through all of it, I had been her unyielding rock. Her protector. Her strongest pillar. To her, I was simply the dependable older foster brother she trusted implicitly.

But to me… she was my entire universe.

And then, my world shattered when I discovered the existence of him—her secret childhood sweetheart, Riven. I hadn’t known about their relationship at first. But even when the tormenting truth came to light, I forced myself to endure the pain. I stayed in the shadows, constantly harboring the desperate hope that she would eventually open her eyes and realize that I was the only man who truly loved her—that no one else on earth could ever worship her the way I did.

But I was dead wrong.

It happened on the night of her twentieth birthday. The exact night Riven proposed to her. In that single, devastating second, something vital snapped inside my soul. My love twisted into a far darker shade—turning into a desperate obsession. I made the absolute cruelest decision of my existence. I abducted her, smuggled her away to this isolated island, and imprisoned her within these stone walls. I tried to ruthlessly force her to love me, demanding that she accept the reality of our fated mate bond to make her completely mine.

And she had suffered immeasurably for my arrogance.

A soft touch pulled me out of the suffocating spiral of my thoughts. I blinked, realizing Bella’s hand was resting gently against mine, her forest-green eyes looking at me with genuine concern.

"Is something wrong, Sebastian?" she asked softly.

I forced a faint, reassuring smile onto my face under her hopeful gaze.

“Nothing,” I exhaled. Then I continued, “If you truly want to go back to Blackvale... we can leave whenever you are ready.”

“Will you come with me?” she asked, her voice laced with a sweet, dependent vulnerability.

I didn’t hesitate for a single fraction of a second. “Of course I will.”

Reaching out, I lightly brushed my knuckle across the tip of her nose, reviving an affectionate habit from our youth. She smiled warmly at the familiar gesture, leaning her head against my shoulder as if it were the most natural place in the world for her to rest.

I let her stay there, wrapping my large arm securely around her waist to pull her close against my chest.

She didn’t remember the horrors of what I had done to her.

But I remembered every single detail.

And as I held her cloned body in the sunlight, I still didn’t know if that absolute memory was a mercy or a curse. All I knew was that she was finally back in my arms.

And for now, that was more than enough.