All Chapters of The Alpha's Regret Came Too Late: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Chapter 32ANTONIOThe trackers came back at two in the morning.I heard them before I saw them — boots on the stone steps of the pack house, more than one set, moving with the particular rhythm of people who are not in a hurry because hurrying no longer serves any purpose. I had been in my study, standing at the window with the silver ribbon still in my hand, watching the tree line for movement. When I heard the steps I was already at the door.Raines was in front. Behind him, four trackers, and behind them two more carrying something between them — a person, supported at the arms and legs, head lolling with the loose unconsciousness of someone who had been badly damaged by something and had not yet found their way back.Marcus Thorne.I crossed the entrance hall in six strides. "Where is she."Raines's face told me before his mouth did. It told me in the way that faces do when the person wearing them has been practicing how to deliver something for the past twenty minutes and has st

Chapter 34ANTONIOI stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Marcus Thorne, who had come to my pack to offer Annabella something real and had driven her away on roads that someone had decided to use as a weapon.He was pale beneath the monitoring equipment, his left arm immobilized, a dressing at his temple. Breathing with the particular labor of someone managing broken ribs even in unconsciousness.Alive.I waited.Portia gave me forty minutes before she came back into the room. By that point the sky outside the facility's small window had begun its shift from black to the dark grey that preceded dawn, and I had been standing in the same position long enough that the cold from the room's stone floor had moved through my boots."He's coming around," Portia said, checking the monitor readings with the focused attention of someone who sees numbers as language. "Keep it brief. And calm. His head—""I understand," I said.Marcus Thorne opened his eyes four minutes later. The process wa

Chapter 36DAMON/LUCIFER{LUCIAN}The ravine was quiet when I reached the bottom.I had come down the eastern approach, the long way, the route that added twelve minutes but kept me off the slope that the pack's trackers would use when they eventually came looking. I had scoped the terrain two days ago when I took the job, the way I always scoped terrain before I worked it. Preparation was the difference between professionals and people who got caught, and I had been doing this long enough that preparation was no longer something I thought about consciously. It was just how I moved through the world. Assess. Plan. Execute. Leave nothing.The car was on its side where it had come to rest against the boulder at the base of the slope. The front end was gone, essentially — compressed into something that no longer resembled the front end of a vehicle, the metal folded back on itself in the particular geometry of high-speed impact. The windscreen had gone entirely. One wheel was still turnin

Chapter 38DAMONThe vehicle was where I had left it.I had staged it two days before the job, the way I staged everything — early, carefully, with enough distance from the target location that it would not be associated with the scene but close enough to be useful under time pressure. A dark truck, unremarkable, the kind of vehicle that existed in the background of every rural road without registering. I had parked it on a forestry track half a kilometer west of the territory boundary, keys under the left rear wheel, full tank, nothing in it that could identify it or me.I got Annabella into the passenger seat without waking her, which she did not do. She had not stirred the entire three hours through the tree line, which was either reassuring or not depending on how you weighed concussion against the alternative. I had been monitoring her breathing the entire way — a rhythm I had tracked against my own footfalls, the way you track something that matters, unconsciously, the way breat

Chapter 40ANNABELLAThe first thing I was aware of was the ceiling.It was unfamiliar — low, wood-beamed, the kind of ceiling that belonged to an old house that had been built by someone who intended it to last rather than to impress. There was a lamp on somewhere to my left, small and warm, and the light it made was the amber color of late afternoon or early evening, and I lay looking at the ceiling and tried to remember how I had come to be beneath it.I could not remember anything that had happened.This was not immediately frightening. It arrived as a fact, the way facts arrive when your body is managing enough other information that it cannot spare urgency for any single thing — my head hurt, specifically and significantly, the kind of pain that had weight to it, that pressed behind my eyes with a persistence that told me it had been there for a while and intended to stay. My hands hurt. My ribs hurt when I breathed, a sharp lateral complaint that made me adjust my breathing wit