Semua Bab THE ALPHA’S REGRET: Bab 11 - Bab 20

The hallway outside the kitchen was empty.Leslie stood in it for a moment, the shopping list pressed against her chest, her breathing shallow and uneven.From the dining room, laughter drifted down the corridor.Deep. Comfortable. The laughter of people who had nowhere to be and nothing to fear and every reason to believe the world was exactly as generous as it appeared.She started walking.Her right hand moved without her realizing it, fingers finding the spot on her shoulder where the papers had struck. She pressed lightly. There was no mark. There never was. Catherine was precise that way. She knew exactly how much damage to inflict without leaving evidence.“Filthy maid.”“Agent of darkness.”“Sorry for yourself.”Leslie kept walking.The words followed her the way Catherine’s words always followed her, not loud, not shouting, just there. Settled into her quietly the way cold settles into a room when a window is left open. You don’t notice the exact moment it arrives. You just r

The street outside the Blackwell estate was the kind of quiet that only exists in neighborhoods where money has bought itself enough space from the rest of the world.No traffic.No voices.No music drifting from open windows.Just the sound of her own footsteps on the pavement.Click.Click.Click.Leslie walked with her arms crossed over her chest, her old jacket pulled tight, the shopping list folded in her pocket. The streetlights here were tall and spaced far apart, casting wide pools of amber light with long stretches of dark between them.She moved through light.Then dark.Then light again.The Blackwell estate sat behind her now, already a block away, its lit windows visible above the wall. She did not look back at it.She had a list.She had a deadline.She had exactly thirty eight minutes to reach a store that was twenty minutes away on foot and she was going to focus on that and nothing else.Her heels clicked steadily on the pavement.She passed a parked car. A trimmed he

Leslie turned slowly toward the driver.The interior of the SUV was dim. The kind of dim that exists in expensive vehicles, deliberate, designed, the soft dark of a space that has been engineered for privacy. The passing streetlights moved through the windshield in slow intervals, and each one illuminated a different fraction of the man beside her.A jaw.A hand on the wheel.The line of a shoulder.She could not see his eyes.He kept them on the road.“I’m sorry,” Leslie said again. Her voice was still unsteady at the edges. “I know what that looked like. Running into the road like that. I just.” She pressed her hand briefly to her chest. “I genuinely thought someone was behind me. I kept hearing footsteps and I looked back and there was nobody there but I could hear them, I know I could hear them.”The driver said nothing.She waited.He drove.“I’m not usually like this,” she said quietly. “I just.” She stopped herself. Took a breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop talking.”He did not resp

“I mean it.” She opened her phone again. No signal. She tried anyway. The call did not connect. She ended it and looked at the screen. Then she tried once more. Nothing. Her confidence slipped. Only slightly. She lowered the phone. The driver had not even looked at her. He did not appear worried. He did not appear surprised. He did not appear to care. That bothered her more than the silence. “You heard me say I was calling the police,” Leslie said. Nothing. “You know I can report you, right?” The SUV turned onto another road. Leslie looked out the window. She did not recognize the area. The streets were almost empty now. A few cars passed in the opposite direction, but there were no restaurants. No crowded sidewalks. No open shops. The city felt farther away. She looked at the door again. Then she pulled the handle. Harder this time. The lock held. “Open the door.” Her voice was louder. The driver continued driving. Leslie pressed the unlock button repeatedly. Once. Twice. Three times

The driver was quiet for long enough that she had begun to assume he would not answer at all. Then he said, without looking at her, “Not to the family.”Two words more than he had given her in the last twenty minutes. She held onto them.“Then to someone inside the house,” she said carefully. “Someone who isn’t family.”He said nothing to that, which was its own kind of confirmation.Leslie looked through the windshield. The street ahead ended at a junction and the driver turned without indicating, the movement unhurried and certain, the movement of someone who had taken this route before. She watched for a street sign and found one. She did not recognize the road name. She tried to build a map in her head of how far they had come from Meridian and in which direction, but she had lost track somewhere in the middle of the journey when she had been too frightened to pay attention to anything except the locked door.She shifted in her seat and looked at him directly.“Someone knew you wo