All Chapters of Alpha's Regret: The Forsaken Luna: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Rhiannon's POVWe told Soren at breakfast.He was eating eggs with the focused intensity he brought to everything, the wooden sword leaning against his chair because he'd started carrying it everywhere again and no one had the heart to stop him, when I said: "You're going to be a big brother."He put down his fork.Looked at me. Looked at Darius. Looked at my stomach with the specific expression of a child performing urgent internal calculations about what this meant for the existing household structure."When?" he asked."A while yet.""How long is a while?""Months."More calculation. "Will it be able to fight?""Eventually.""Will I have to teach it?""Probably some things."He picked his fork back up. "Can it be a dog instead?" he asked, and went back to his eggs.Darius made a sound I'd only heard from him three times and always in moments he wasn't trying to control."No," I said."I just think a dog would be—""No, Soren.""Okay." A pause. Then, more quietly, without looking up

Rhiannon's POVThe forest clearing was an hour's ride north of Crescent Moon and had been chosen by Malachar's letter as neutral ground—equidistant from his territory and ours, old trees, no pack boundaries.I came alone.Darius had not slept the night before the meeting. He'd said nothing about it and I'd said nothing about his silence, but I'd felt him through the bond—the particular wakefulness of a person lying in the dark doing arithmetic about risk that doesn't have clean answers.In the morning he'd walked me to the forest border and said: "If anything feels wrong—""I'll leave.""The moment anything—""Darius."He'd looked at me. At the bond between us, steady and present and carrying everything it now carried."Come back," he said."Always."I rode alone into the morning forest and found the clearing and dismounted and waited.Malachar came from between two trees that were old enough to have been saplings when he was born, which was a thought I declined to sit with too long.

Rhiannon's POVHe told us in pieces.Not all at once—Moira had warned us about this, the way trauma surfaces in fragments, the way children work through difficult things sideways before they can approach them directly. We didn't push. We just made sure there was space—meal times, the walk to the forest, the hour before bed—where the fragments could arrive if they needed to.The first one came in the bath."He had a locket," Soren said, pouring water from a small cup into a larger one with the focus he brought to experiments."Who did?""The old one. Malachar." He watched the water transfer. "He wore it all the time. Even at night I think. He would hold it sometimes when he thought no one was watching." He looked up at me. "What was in it?""A picture of someone he loved. Someone he lost."Soren poured the water back. "Like how you keep Nana Lyra's bracelet even though she's gone?"My mother's bracelet, silver and worn, which I'd found among Nyx's things years ago and never put down. "

I sat with it for one hour before I told anyone.That was not long, measured against twenty-six days of Soren being gone, or five years of rebuilding from nothing, or a childhood of being the pack's invisible omega. But it was the hour I needed—sitting in the window seat of my room with the morning light coming sideways through the glass, processing the thing Nyx had confirmed with the quiet precision of someone who had checked three times before saying it aloud.Pregnant.Not the word that undid me. The arithmetic that followed it.A child born into this—into a pack that had chosen us, a father who was learning his son's rhythms and doing it with the kind of patience that earned something, a fortress forty miles north that we were about to negotiate peace with, a world that was wider and more complicated and more real than the one I'd planned for in the Forbidden Zone.I sat with all of it.Then I thought about my mother. Lyra, who had lived thirty years as a wolfless omega and never

Darius's POVThe council met on the first day of what everyone was calling the final week, though no one said that aloud because saying it aloud felt like tempting something.Thorne sat across from me at the table with the manner of a man who has made a decision about how this was going to go and was now implementing it without further deliberation. He'd been doing this for three weeks—arriving at councils with positions already formed, arguing them efficiently, then shifting course when presented with better information without making a performance of the shift. It was, I was discovering, considerably more useful than the performance.The council chamber had twelve seats. We were using seven. The remaining five had belonged to Thorne's original faction—three of whom had eventually aligned with the new structure, two of whom had left the territory with their families the week after the Bloodletter attack and had not returned. The empty seats were a fact we worked around."Border patro