All Chapters of The Alpha's Greatest Regret: Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

LISA’S POVI wore black because I couldn't picture myself in anything else. The dress had been hanging in my closet for six years, bought for an elder's funeral I'd barely sat through, worn once, and then forgotten.It still fit. The mirror gave me back a woman with cold flat eyes and her hair pulled too tight, and what caught me wasn't that I looked like a widow. It was that I'd had the right dress in there the whole time, waiting years without either of us knowing what for.Lily's room was just as she'd left it. I'd made the bed myself the morning before she died, grumbling about it the way I grumbled every morning, and it was still made, and it would stay made now.Her stuffed bunny sat on the pillow. Her drawings covered most of one wall. On the desk, the blue wolf she'd been making for Alice lay half-finished, half a tail, because she'd run out of afternoon and said tomorrow about it the way children say tomorrow about everything.I straightened one of her dolls that didn't need s

ALICE'S POVHe came at dusk with the council record under his arm, which meant they'd finished hours ago and somebody had spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether I was allowed to read it."You're entitled to it," Callum said. "Anybody under confinement gets the record of a session where their name comes up. Old rule. Nobody's pulled it in thirty years.""Whose idea was it to pull it now?""Mine. The Alpha signed it without reading past the first line, which I'd call permission."The guard on my step had drifted back far enough to give us the look of privacy. Moths had found the porch light already. One kept going at the glass, again and again, the same small dry sound."Is it bad?"Callum took his time with that. Longer than I wanted. "It's well done. Which is worse."Somebody had copied the whole thing out in small tight handwriting, the elders' names down the margin, and here and there a square bracket where he'd set down something that wasn't speech.Sorin read John's findi

BENJAMIN'S POVCallum came to my office door at first light instead of my bedroom, and that told me they'd already assembled without sending for me."All of them?""All of them. Sorin's chairing. They've been in there since before the bell.""Then they've voted.""They've decided. The vote's for your benefit."There was a man up a ladder in the hallway changing a bulb that had been dead since before any of this started, and I had to stand there while he shifted it to let me past. He apologized twice. Something in how I told him it was fine made him apologize a third time.We walked. Callum kept his voice low beside me. "Half this pack thinks she poisoned that child. The other half thinks somebody tried to poison her and missed. Nobody's slept properly in a week. Whatever comes out of that room, they need to see process.""They'll come round the day I put somebody in front of them in handcuffs. That's all any of this is. People want a name, and when they get one they'll forget every wo

ALICE'S POVSorin didn't answer her. She looked past me instead, down the length of the room, to where Benjamin stood.He didn't move. No nod, no hand, nothing. He'd spent an hour of his own authority buying the arrangement that put me in this chair, and part of what he'd bought was that he didn't get to interfere with the process now."Doctor Watson," Sorin said. "It's yours to refuse.""She can ask."Lisa came up out of the back row and stopped a few feet short of my chair, close enough not to raise her voice, far enough that nobody could call it standing over me. Black dress, hands loose in front of her. She didn't look at the elders once."Did Lily trust you?" she said."Yes.""Did she come and see you often?""Every week.""Did she bring you things? Drawings?""Every week.”"She loved you." It was not a question, and she left it out there long enough for the room to hear it as one. "Didn't she?.""Yes. She did."Lisa nodded, slow, as her eyes swelled up with tears, and she let th

Benjamin’s POV "Or she was clever enough to see it coming.""Then there is no answer available to her." He turned his palms up and let them drop. "None. You've built a shape she can't get out of. Calm and she's hiding it. Distressed and she's performing. Helpful and she's clever. Silent and she's guilty. I've sat at this table thirty years and I won't vote inside a shape like that."Marcus spoke without lifting his eyes off the page in front of him. "There's a simpler problem and we all keep walking around it. Every ruling in this business has come from a man who cannot be objective about the woman at the center of it, and this morning he negotiated the terms of her questioning and had them recorded under his own name."That was my moment to answer him. There wasn't a sentence in me that wouldn't have proved him right in front of eight people, so I stayed where I was and let Marcus have the last word about me while Harris wrote something down.Then Petra said, "So we tighten the conf