Honestly, I think the core trigger is less about the 'faking death' act itself and more about the specific psychological wound it exploits. Alphas in these narratives are often built on control and possession, a belief that their perception of reality, especially regarding their mate, is infallible. The madness erupts when that foundational belief is shattered not by an enemy, but by the person they believed they owned completely. It's the ultimate cognitive dissonance: their senses told them she was gone, their world confirmed it, yet she engineered the entire illusion. That's not just grief; it's a deep, personal betrayal of reality by the one person whose reality was supposed to be tethered to his.
What really pushes it into 'madness' territory, for me, is the removal of a tangible target for his rage. If she were truly dead, he could direct his pain into vengeance against a foe or mourn a tragic loss. But she chose to make him mourn. She made him experience that devastating grief, watched him potentially unravel from a distance, and deemed it a necessary price for her freedom. That passive aggression, the fact that his suffering was a calculated part of her plan and not a tragic side effect, seems to be the fuel for the obsessive, 'find her and never let her go again' madness. It twists his love into a frantic, paranoid need to re-establish control over a narrative she stole from him.
The power shift is brutal. In faking her death, she demonstrates a superior cunning—she out-Alpha'd the Alpha, in a sense. His madness is the volatile reaction of a dominant personality whose dominance has been fundamentally challenged and proven illusory. The 'search' becomes less about reunion and more about restoring a shattered ego, forcing the world back into an order where he cannot be deceived so profoundly. It's that cocktail of betrayed possession, wounded pride, and the terrifying realization of his own vulnerability that really drives the engine of these stories.