Evan was silent for two seconds, then nodded. "Indeed... if you hadn't told us in advance, we wouldn't have thought she was that woman from seven years ago..."
"Layla." I cut him off. "Her name is Layla Gray."
"Yes, Alpha."
I continued flipping through the file. Studio address, main clients, design works, awards... all the surface information, the polished details anyone could find. And the emotions rising in my chest were complex enough to nearly suffocate me.
Wild joy. Guilt. Longing.
And anger. A dark, obsessive anger that even I found shameful.
She was alive. She'd been in this city for seven years. She'd changed her name, her identity, even the color of her eyes.
And then? Then she'd pretended to be a stranger in front of me, looked at me with those fake blue eyes, and coldly said, "Sir, you've mistaken me for someone else."
Such a casual dismissal, shutting me out of her world.
Seven years, alone, losing her original identity. How had she survived that freezing seawater? How had she given birth alone, raised him? How had she lived so well... without me?
I almost felt ashamed of that last thought.
But she didn't seem to need me anymore. To her, I was dispensable now. The love that belonged to me—intense, genuine, eternal, mine alone—when I'd grown as accustomed to it as oxygen, it vanished.
Turns out suffocation hurts this much.
"You know I don't need this surface-level information." Impulse was burning through my reason.
Evan sighed, pulling out a stack from the bottom of the file.
"Already prepared." He spread them out before me. "Private investigators, surveillance footage, some obtained... illegally."
The first page was a hospital surveillance screenshot.
The image quality was grainy, but I could clearly see a woman sitting on a hallway bench.
Layla.
She wore cheap maternity clothes, belly swollen, head down, hands wrapped around her abdomen, shoulders trembling.
She was crying.
Date stamp: seven years ago, November.
My breathing stopped for a second. My fingers gripped the photo's edge so hard my knuckles went white.
She was pregnant with our child, sitting alone in a strange hospital hallway, crying silently.
What made her cry? The tight finances, the loneliness of no companion, the hardship of learning design from scratch, pregnancy discomfort, or that she should have had a mate?
And I... I was handling Alpha business in the pack, strategizing at business negotiation tables, swearing at my father's grave that I'd never be bound by a fated mate. How fucking ironic.
I turned to the next page.
A cramped rental apartment. She held a baby in swaddling clothes, sitting at a desk piled with design sketches.
The baby was crying.
She rocked him gently while staring at the computer screen, eyes bloodshot. The desk clock showed 3:17 AM. Beside it were bottles, diapers, and several well-worn parenting books.
