Goodbye, My Alpha. I’m Gone

Chapter 4

I was halfway through packing when the air in the room grew so heavy and stifling that I could barely catch my breath.

I made my way up to the study on the second floor, where Kieran had placed all sorts of bone ornaments and carvings, though tucked away in the corner, there was one single piece that belonged to me, a small bone token that was the only thing Sean had ever left behind for me.

After that great battle, all of Sean's armor and beast gear had been damaged beyond repair and were burned. The only traces of him that remained in this world, apart from me, were this little bone token. He had carved it with his own hands from a shoulder bone that naturally shed when he came of age. On it, he had carved two wolf markings intertwined as if they were one, sealing inside a wisp of his very own spirit essence—a scent that was uniquely and unmistakably his.

I used to tease him about why he had not simply given me some precious moonstone instead of going through all that trouble to carve a piece of bone.

He would always laugh and pinch my cheek, telling me, "Bone holds spirit essence. As long as this token stays with you, a part of my presence will always be by your side, no matter where you go."

He never had to say the rest out loud. I understood it perfectly well that this was Sean's way of hoping that no matter what hardships I faced, I would always remember that I still had him watching over me and protecting me from somewhere beyond.

But that carved bone token was accidentally knocked off by Tina on the day she came to visit. It fell to the stone floor with a dull c***k that split the carved patterns right open, and the spirit essence sealed inside scattered into the air and vanished in an instant, never to be recovered, no matter how I searched.

That was the first time I had ever lost my temper in front of everyone. I shouted at her, "Why were you running around in here and breaking my bone token!"

Tina went deathly pale, stammering and unable to get a single word out in her defense, just sobbing nonstop.

Kieran rushed over at the sound of the commotion and immediately stepped in front of her, shielding her behind him, his normally calm face turning cold and hard as he told me, "It's just a piece of discarded bone. If it's broken, I'll find you a few more to replace it. Why do you have to be so harsh with her?"

I could no longer hold back the hurt and grievance that had been building up inside me, and for the very first time, I talked back to him. "This one... it held Sean's spirit essence."

But he shot back, "It's nothing but a piece of bone. Can you please stop making such a fuss over nothing?"

That was when I finally broke down in tears. To him, it was just a useless scrap of animal bone, yet I had already told him the story behind that token long ago. He simply had never cared enough to remember a single word of it.

Too angry to hold back another word, I let the words fly out of my mouth before I could stop them. "So, anything Tina gives you is a treasure, while the only thing I hold dear is nothing but worthless garbage to you?"

Kieran simply looked at me as if I had lost all reason, then wiped the tears from Tina's cheeks and walked away with her. That marked the first time we had ever fallen into that cold silence.

The irony of it all was that in the end, it was Tina who came to smooth things over, arriving at my door with a new bone token that she had asked a craftsman to replicate. She apologized, "Sofia, I really didn't mean to break your bone token. Here, I had this replica made for you to replace it. Kieran has been so down these past few days, so now that you've calmed down, could you please go and cheer him up?"

The replica looked almost exactly the same as the original, but it carried none of Sean's spirit essence. Yet at that very moment, I found myself almost believing, in some strange way, that I had been the one at fault from the very beginning.

Shaking off those tangled thoughts, I let my fingertips trace lightly over the broken shards of the original token. The faint, lingering trace of spirit essence that still clung to them faded away into the air like smoke. I knew then that whatever tie had once bound me to Kieran ought to end the same way, quietly and completely, with nothing left behind to hold on to.