God help me

God help me
The sound of her retreating footsteps on the hardwood was the most terrifying thing I had ever heard. It was sharp, rhythmic, and final.
"Please. Don't leave me."
The words escaped my lips before I could check them, before my pride could bury them. I heard the tremor in my own voice—the raw, unfiltered sound of an Alpha who had spent centuries commanding respect, now reduced to a beggar. I took a half-step forward, my hand outstretched, trembling. "Éloïse, please. We can talk about this. I can change the perimeter protocols, I can—"
"I need to be alone!"
Her yell tore through the room, vibrating with a frustration that had clearly been building since the moment she walked through that door. She didn't look back. She didn't hesitate. She turned on her heel and sprinted down the hallway toward the guest wing, her scent—that beautiful, grounded smell of cedar and rain—fading with every stride she took away from me.
The door to the guest wing slammed shut. The echo seemed to rattle the very bones of the house.
I stood there, paralyzed in the center of the kitchen, the marble island still feeling cold under my fingertips. The silence that rushed back in to fill the space she had vacated was absolute. It was a suffocating, heavy silence that pressed against my lungs.
I felt the bond between us—the delicate, silver thread that connected my soul to hers—thrumming with her distress, her need for space, and a stinging, painful rejection. It burned. It felt like my skin was being pulled apart.
I didn't follow her. I couldn't.
For the first time since I’d found her, I was forced to confront the reality that my 'protection' was the very thing driving her to the brink. I looked around the room—the remnants of my panicked mobilization, the stark, empty space where she had stood just moments ago.
I am not Shallow, I told myself, my knuckles white as I gripped the edge of the counter again. I am not him.
But as I looked at the dark hallway, I felt the sickening, cold realization that I had become her jailer. I had taken her out of a cage of iron and replaced it with a cage of gold and tactical security. I hadn't given her freedom; I had simply changed the person who controlled her boundaries.
I sank onto one of the kitchen stools, burying my face in my hands. The wolf inside me was prowling, agitated, wanting to howl, wanting to smash through the door and drag her back to the center of my world, to remind her that she was mine.
"God help me," I rasped into the hollow of my palms.
I loved her so much it felt like a sickness, a terminal diagnosis. I loved her enough to know that if I breached that door, if I forced her to stay, I would lose the only part of her that actually mattered: her spirit.
I sat in the dark, the sun finally dipping below the horizon, leaving the condo in shadows. I listened to the ocean. It was relentless, just like my panic, just like the threat of Kael, and just like the terrifying, soaring possibility that I had pushed her so far that she wouldn't come back.
I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I just waited, staring at the closed door, enduring the agony of her absence, and praying to every god I’d ever ignored that she wouldn't leave me for good.
The heavy tread of a subordinate broke through my stupor. One of my lead security men—a man whose face I’d looked at a hundred times but couldn't name in this moment—stepped back into the kitchen, his posture stiff, his eyes darting toward the closed door of the guest wing.
"Alpha," he said, his voice clipped, professional, and entirely grating. "The team is waiting for instruction. Do we pull back to the harbor, or do we maintain the perimeter? The town is restless."
I didn’t even look at him. My gaze was fixed on the sliver of light beneath the guest wing door. I felt a surge of violent, incoherent rage—not at the man, but at the necessity of him. I wanted to burn the tactical gear, smash the comms, and cast the entire concept of 'security' into the Atlantic. But the shadow of Kael whispered in the back of my mind, a cold, mocking voice that reminded me what happened when an Alpha let his guard down.
I just nodded, a jerky, mechanical movement of my head. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered if she wasn't here.
I felt like I was drowning in shallow water. My lungs burned with every breath, and I couldn't understand why the room felt so empty when it was still cluttered with the equipment of war. My own mind felt fractured, like a mirror dropped on concrete—I was the protector, the Alpha, the lover, and the prisoner, all at once.
Then, a presence shifted at the edge of my vision.
Dante.