Alle Kapitel von Alpha's Regret: The Forsaken Luna: Kapitel 141 – Kapitel 147

Rhiannon's POVHe stayed for a week.Not because he had to — the treaty had no residency requirements, and there was no obligation beyond what he chose. He stayed because, I suspected, the packhouse was the place where the world he was re-entering felt most navigable. The world beyond it was enormous and fifteen years changed and he was two thousand years old with no fixed purpose for the first time in centuries.That was a large thing to wake up to.We gave him space and we gave him presence in equal measure, which was the correct balance and which I hadn't worked out in advance but found myself doing by instinct. Space: no one demanded his time or attention or explanation for anything. Presence: he was included in meals, in the ambient warmth of the packhouse's daily life, in the particular texture of a household that had figured out how to contain its complicated things with grace.He found me in the garden on the third morning.This was a garden Sera had planted in the first year

Rhiannon's POVHe came home from Clearwater on a Thursday.The town was two hours south — not a long journey, but long enough that his absences had become a regular feature of the household, the particular texture of a family with a member who was beginning to live partially in the world beyond it. He was there twice a month, working with Moira's counterpart in the southern district on the cases that came through: injuries, illnesses, the occasional magical imbalance in one of the younger shifters.He was good at it.I knew this not from Moira — she was professionally restrained in her assessments — but from the letters that came, sometimes, from the families of people he'd treated. They were specific in what they said. Not the general gratitude of people who had been helped, but the specific accounting of someone who had noticed that the healer's hands knew what they were doing and also that the healer himself had understood something beyond the technical.He came home Thursday after

Rhiannon's POVWe built it in the summer of their twenty-first year.Not far — twenty minutes from the packhouse, at the edge of the territory where the old forest started. A low stone building with a view east into the trees and a stream audible from the doorway, in the same configuration as the safe house we'd borrowed for the honeymoon, which was not accidental.I'd wanted it for years. Not as a retreat — as a place that belonged to both of us the way the packhouse belonged to the pack. Something that wasn't architecture of function but architecture of choice.We built it over a summer with help from pack members who showed up uninvited and stayed for the satisfaction of the work, which was its own category of pack belonging — the decision to build something together, not because anyone had asked.Marcus built the shelving along the east wall.Thorne, who had never in our acquaintance indicated any interest in construction, showed up on the third week with tools and specific opinio

Rhiannon's POVEvening. October. The cabin.Darius and I sat on the step outside with the fire laid but not lit, the stream audible, the trees making their autumn sound — the particular dry whisper of leaves deciding to let go."Do you remember," he said, "the night before the ceremony? Six years before the rejection. When I found you in the pack's inner courtyard."I remembered.I'd been seventeen. He'd been walking the grounds on some task I'd already forgotten and he'd stopped when he saw me and said something — a compliment, easy and instinctive, the kind he'd given without thinking about before he'd learned to think about everything. I'd been so unaccustomed to being spoken to directly that I'd gone slightly frozen."You told me I looked like I was carrying something," I said. "You asked if I needed help.""Did I?""You don't remember?""I remember you," he said. "I remember stopping because of you. I don't remember what I said." He paused. "What did you tell me?""That I was fin