All Chapters of The Alpha's Greatest Regret: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

BENJAMIN'S POVI was awake before the alarm went off, and the first thing in my head was my conversation with Alice last night. She had helped identify the masking scent and now I can’t stop thinking about who would have gone through all that trouble to either cover their tracks or mislead the investigation from the very beginning.I showered and got ready before making it down to my office. The day didn’t wait for an Alpha to sort through his thoughts before it barges in.I barely made it to my seat before the door was thrown open and Callum walked into my office with the morning reports."Northern border's been quiet. The water supply in the northern quarters has been fixed and the new pipe's in place, and the last two of those children who came down with fever went back home this morning." He set the first folder down. “The eastern woodland search found nothing further—the rain washed out most of the remaining tracks."I signed the reports one after another. Border patrol. Supply r

DRAKE'S POVThe pack training grounds sat empty an hour after evening drills ended, out past where the compound quit and the trees started. That's where I waited for a woman who had no idea she was the one being hunted.I’d learned long ago that hunting wasn’t always about chasing. Sometimes you simply stopped moving. The prey came to you, thinking it chose to.Somebody had left the practice dummies out, and the frames creaked every time the wind got around them. It's the only sound that place makes when it's empty.Benjamin's instruction that morning had been simple: give her nothing but true things she couldn't use. A delegate from shadow moon. Came recently. Keeps to himself.I'd already decided I wasn't going to do that.I didn't have to wait very long before I heard familiar footsteps behind me."I was starting to think you were avoiding me."Her voice came across the ground behind me. I turned around slow, because there's no reason to be quick about anything with that woman.She

LISA'S POVI don't remember the walk back home.I remember smiling at the guard on the Alpha House gate. I remember nodding at the woman who sells the bread, and the blacksmith's apprentice putting a hand up to me from across the row, and mine going up back like somebody had asked it to. My body did every one of those things right while the inside of my head came apart at the seams. Then my own front door. The latch catching behind me.And my legs gave out.I slid down the door and hit the floor, breathing so hard my ribs ached. Drake Watson. Third Alpha of Shadow Moon. Alice’s brother. The name pounded through my skull like a drumbeat.“No.” My voice came out thin. “No. That’s impossible.”I laughed once. The sound broke into something closer to a sob.I pushed myself up and staggered into the sitting room. My notebook lay on the table where I’d left it. Cole. Shadow Moon? Drake? I grabbed it and read the words again. Then I tore the page out. Tore it again. Again. Again. The pieces

ALICE'S POVI've been waiting nine days to get Benjamin on his own.Not for a reason I could say out loud to anybody. He stood in my clinic and asked me how you keep a wolf from smelling something. Then he said not yet when I asked the details of his question. Then he picked up my case, walked me down to the southern quarter, fixed a widow's gate on the way past, and went home. And every morning since, I've gone to work with a cotton pouch in my desk drawer that was made by a child who's dead.Nine days of that, and no way to get near the man without half the territory watching.So when Callum turned up in my clinic doorway, I was already thinking about it.I was at the sink after the last of the morning list. He had a folder under his arm and he'd been up since before it was light, by the look of him, and hadn't sat down once."I need a favor.""That depends.""Benjamin signed the authorization for Elder Rowan's medicine and then left it on his desk instead of giving it to me." He he

I went out that afternoon to find out where Drake Watson sleeps.That's all I wanted. Where he stays. Who else is in the building. Whether there's an hour anywhere in his day when he's alone. You can't plan a single thing until you know that much, and I have four days.I got as far as the top of the market and turned around and came home. The compound had changed while I was in my kitchen burning paper.The small things came first — a patrol wolf nodded at me by the well, the same man who hasn't said one word to me in nine years of passing him. Another one stood at the fruit stalls a good twenty minutes past any business he had there, turning the same apples over and buying none of them.They won't follow me. They're too well trained for that. They just turn up at the edges of wherever I'm already going, unhurried, like they'd been standing there since dawn and I'd only now walked into them.Benjamin has learned restraint.The man he used to be three years ago would have come to my doo