All Chapters of My Alpha’s Regret: Chasing My Pregnant Ex-Wife After Divorce: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

CarlFor one full second nobody in that passage moved, and in that second my brain tried to make the resemblance mean something small and manageable… a cousin, a trick of the dim light, some distant relation Melinda had never mentioned because there was too much else to mention first.My brain wanted a small explanation. My gut had already stopped believing in small explanations somewhere around the second time this night had asked me to."Seren," Aldric said, and his voice had gone flat in a way that told me everything I needed to know before she confirmed it. "You were supposed to be an ocean away by now.""I was supposed to do a lot of things," she said. Her voice matched the one still faintly audible through the phone still pressed to my ear, and I realized with a lurch that she'd been standing close enough this whole time to hear both sides of a conversation I'd thought was private."I changed my mind about most of them tonight."

MelindaAn hour. That was the only time I knew I needed to make a mark, something that would change the course of everything we had been fighting for ever since. I was never going to rest until I got to the bottom of this, with or without Carl or my brother’s help.I stared at the words until they blurred, until Carl's hand closed gently over mine and the phone disappeared from my grip into his pocket, some quiet decision made between us without either of us saying it aloud… that I couldn't keep looking at that countdown and still think clearly enough to survive it."Aldric," Carl said, turning sharply. "Anything?"Aldric held up a finger, phone pressed to his ear, murmuring low and urgent to whoever had answered. The rest of us stood in that ruined clearing, my daughter still held gently in the guard's arms though nobody seemed inclined to enforce the earlier hostage arrangement anymore, my son's frightened voice still occasionally drifting from

MelindaShe unfolded the paper slowly, and I caught the edges of it trembling slightly in her hands, the first real crack I'd seen in her composure since we'd stepped into that room."Before I read this," Corinne said, "you should understand something about the man who wrote it. He wasn't afraid of your bloodline the way Aldric is. He spent the last six months of his life trying to convince the council of the opposite. That's why he died.""Then read it," I said. "Please."She smoothed the paper against her palm and began, her voice dropping into something quieter, more careful, like she was handling something fragile enough to shatter if spoken too roughly."'The twins born of the split bloodline are not, as feared, a vessel for catastrophe. They are the fulfillment of a debt this territory has owed for four generations. The original division was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to be a wound, held open deliberately, so that whe

MelindaVoss went utterly still, his hand frozen halfway inside his robes, and for the first time all night I watched real fear cross his composed face."Marcus," he said, and the name landed in the chamber like a stone dropped down a well. "You're supposed to be dead.""Supposed to be a great many things," the lead figure said, echoing words I'd heard twice already tonight from two different mouths, and something cold settled in my stomach at the realization that this whole conspiracy seemed built from the same handful of phrases, passed hand to hand across thirty years like a language only they understood."Aldric's second, before Aldric decided caution was safer than ambition. I decided otherwise."My son's frightened voice earlier that morning surfaced suddenly in my memory, the name he'd said to me at the tower, the name that had stopped me cold before I'd even fully understood why. Marcus…this was him."You used my son," I

CarlThe amber light spreading across the floor wasn't gentle this time. It surged up from the carved lines like something had been struck open, racing along the branches of that ancient family tree until it converged directly beneath Melinda and Ashley's joined hands."Get back," I shouted, already moving to pull them clear, but the light had already wrapped itself around their ankles, the same way it had in the chapel hours before, except faster now, hungrier, climbing past their knees before I could close the distance."Carl, don't," Melinda gasped, her whole body rigid. "If you touch it while it's active, you don't know what it does to you.""I don't care what it does to me," I said, reaching for her anyway, only for Voss's hand to close hard around my arm, hauling me back with surprising strength for a man who'd nearly died twice tonight already."Listen to her," Voss said sharply. "This isn't the binding ritual. This is something re