Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha's Regret Came Too Late: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 19

Chapter 11ANNALISA"You spent six months in the administrative archive before the wedding." He said it flatly, as if he had known this all along, which startled me because I had never mentioned it to him. "You know those records better than anyone currently on staff. The Beta has reviewed the maps. He hasn't touched the original succession documents.""No," I agreed slowly. "He wouldn't have. Most people don't bother with those. They're tedious and the filing system is—" I stopped. He was watching me with that focused attention that still felt disorienting. "Thursday is fine. I can have a briefing summary prepared by Wednesday evening.""Good." He turned to go, then paused. "How long has the attendance record system been organized this way?"I glanced at the files spread across the desk. "About four years. I redesigned it when I was working here. The original system cross-referenced by age group, but that made it nearly impossible to track siblings or mixed-age pack families. I restr

Chapter 13ANTONIOI did not understand Annalisa.This was not a new problem. I had not understood her for the entirety of our two-year marriage, though I had the honesty to admit—to myself, at least, in the privacy of my own thoughts—that I had never tried particularly hard to remedy that. She had been a fixture of the pack house, a quiet presence that moved through the background of my life without disrupting it, and I had been content to leave it that way. It had been convenient. Easy. The kind of arrangement that required nothing of me.Now she was standing in my study with that composed, infuriating steadiness of hers, telling me that the Moon Rite preparations were well in hand, that she would take full responsibility, and I found myself staring at her profile and feeling something I could not name pressing uncomfortably against my ribs.It was not the first time in the past weeks that this had happened. It was becoming, in fact, a rather persistent problem.I watched her gather

Chapter 15ANTONIOI noticed the way she smiled when she was genuinely pleased about something—not the careful, composed smile she produced in formal situations, but the real one, which was different and considerably more difficult to look at directly.She had smiled like that on the drive home from the Delacroix visit, talking about Marguerite's garden, and I had nearly missed the turning onto the main road.The domestic habits accumulated without my deciding to allow them. I found myself checking her schedule against mine—not consciously, exactly, but practically, in the way of someone who has begun to organize their day around an assumption of shared time. I found myself, in meetings, glancing toward where she sat and registering her reactions as a data point I relied on. When she made a small note on her pad—a habit she had when something struck her as significant—I registered it and waited for her to speak, and when she did, I had started giving her observations more weight than

Chapter 17ANNALISAMarcus Thorne was easy to talk to.This was the first thing I noticed about him, and it struck me as significant because I had spent most of my life finding conversation difficult—not the performance of it, which I had learned through necessity, but the actual ease of it, the feeling of speaking to someone without calculating each word for potential damage. Marcus asked questions and waited for the full answer before forming his response. He remembered details from previous conversations. He treated my opinions as data worth collecting rather than noise to be politely absorbed and discarded.We met three times in the week following his visit with Antonio, twice in the pack house and once at the school with Principal Davies, and by the end of the third meeting I had agreed to take the lead position on the inter-pack education cooperation program with a decisiveness that surprised me slightly. I was not, generally, decisive about things that were for myself. Things f

Chapter 19ANNALISAThe crisis began on a Tuesday.I arrived at the school that morning to find three separate things wrong simultaneously, which should have told me something—three separate things going wrong simultaneously is rarely coincidence.The first was that the data sharing system Marcus's team had established for tracking student outcomes across the territories had corrupted overnight. Not a simple glitch,the corruption was specific and thorough, affecting six months of carefully compiled records in a way that suggested someone had intentionally sabotaged it rather than it being technical failure.The second was that seventeen pups from the Silverpine exchange program, who were scheduled to arrive at the Greenwood school for their three-day integration visit, had received communications canceling the visit—communications that appeared to have originated from my official program account and that I had not sent.The third was that the parents of four Greenwood pups with delaye