Todos os capítulos de The Alpha’s Regret: Mommy’s Secret Triplets: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

She saw him the moment she cleared the doorway.Caleb stood at the front of the hall on the raised ceremonial platform, and even through a hundred and sixty bodies and the thick warmth of candle smoke, he pulled her attention the way north pulls a compass. Automatic. Helpless. She had never fully figured out how to stop it.He was in formal black. Shoulders straight, jaw set, saying something to his Beta with the easy confidence of a man who had been rehearsing this night for years. He looked like an Alpha already. He had always looked like an Alpha, authority sat on him naturally, without effort, the way it only does on people born expecting the world to arrange itself around them.Aria moved carefully through the crowd, sideways between bodies, murmuring quiet excuse mes that nobody acknowledged. The hall smelled of candle wax and formal perfume and underneath it all that dense animal warmth that meant pack, meant belonging, meant a room full of people who all had somewhere they sto

The forest swallowed the wind differently than open ground did.Out on the path it had come straight and purposeful, cutting through clothing and finding skin. In here it moved between the trees in broken currents, unpredictable, hitting her from the left and then from nowhere and then from below somehow, cold rising up through the ground into the soles of her boots like the earth itself was pulling warmth out of her.She kept walking.There was no trail. She had known there wouldn't be, the Ashen Forest wasn't the kind of place that accommodated visitors, so she moved by instinct and the faint logic of keeping the wind at her back, which at least meant she was moving in a consistent direction even if she couldn't have named it.Northeast, Bren had said. Nine miles to a road.She didn't know how long she had been walking. Long enough that the packhouse lights, which she had been able to see faintly through the trees for the first stretch, were gone now. Long enough that the cold had m

The first thing she noticed was the ceiling.It was high, impossibly high for any room she had ever woken up in carved stone with inlaid panels that caught the morning light coming through windows she couldn't yet see. She stared at it for a long moment without moving, the way you do when your body wakes up before your memory does and there is a brief, merciful gap between consciousness and the full weight of everything that happened the night before.The gap closed.She sat up too fast and immediately regretted it, her head swam, her arms shook with the effort, and a hand appeared at her shoulder from the right side of the bed before she had even registered if someone was there."Slowly," a woman's voice said. Firm but not unkind.Aria let herself be guided back against the pillows. She turned her head.The woman beside her was older, silver-haired, dressed in a fitted uniform the color of deep charcoal. She had the precise, unhurried movements of someone who had been doing this, wha

The flowers were white roses.Chloe had insisted on white roses, three hundred of them, imported, which had cost the pack more than its monthly food supply allocation and which Caleb had approved without argument because arguing with Chloe about anything in the six weeks since the Ascension Ceremony had proven to be a specific kind of exhausting he didn't have the reserves for right now.The great hall looked different dressed for a wedding. Softer. The same carved stone walls and iron fixtures, but the roses and the ribbon and the candlelight did something to the severity of the space, smoothed its edges, made it look like a place where good things happened.Caleb stood at the altar and watched his pack file in.They were dressed well. Smiling. There was genuine warmth in the room, he could feel it, the particular frequency of a pack that was celebrating something, that had decided collectively to be happy about a thing. He had built this. He had made this choice, and his pack was be

It happened six months later, on a Thursday.Not dramatically, that was the thing nobody told you about labor, that it started as an inconvenience before it became a crisis. Aria was in the library when the first contraction hit, sitting in the window seat with a history text open across her knees, and for a moment she simply thought she had been sitting in the same position too long.Then the second one came fourteen minutes later.Then the third one came nine minutes after that.She closed the book. Set it carefully on the shelf. Walked to the door and told the guard stationed outside to find Maren.She was very calm about it. She had decided months ago to be calm about it, had made the decision the way she made most decisi