All Chapters of THE ALPHA’S REGRET: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

She looked at the armchairs. The table. The curtained window. The door standing slightly ajar on the far side of the room, dark beyond the gap.Nothing.She crossed the room and sat in the armchair closest to the door she had come through. She set her purse in her lap and folded her hands over it and watched Marcus sit down across from her.He placed a plain folder on the table without opening it.The feeling did not go away.She told herself it was the fear still moving through her. The residue of the locked doors and the dark streets and the gun she had seen and was not going to think about directly. She was in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar man and her body was doing what bodies do when they do not feel safe.She told herself that.The feeling remained, quiet and persistent, sitting beneath everything else like something waiting to be acknowledged.Marcus looked at her across the table.“You’ve checked every exit in this room since you sat down,” he said.“Yes,” Leslie said

Devin looked at her for a moment. Then he said, “The east wing.”Leslie said nothing.“You’ve never been inside it,” Devin said. “Not once in two months. Catherine has her private entrance on that side of the house. Her own staff. Her own rooms. You were told, directly or indirectly, that it was not a part of the house that concerned you.”Leslie kept her face still.She had not told Marcus about the east wing. She had not mentioned it in the car or anywhere else. It was simply a fact about the house that she had absorbed in her first week and stopped thinking about because there was nothing to think about. It was Catherine’s space. She stayed out of it.“That’s not unusual,” Leslie said carefully. “Large houses have separate wings. People have private spaces.”“They do,” Devin agreed. “But the east wing of that house has a separate security system from the rest of the property. A different code. Different cameras on a different server.” He held her gaze. “The main house security feed

“Maria, did you call the damn phone?”Catherine’s voice cracked through the sitting room.Maria flinched.Catherine turned sharply from the window, her arms dropping from where they had been folded across her chest.“How many times?”“Ma’am, I—”“How many damn times, Maria?”“Four,” Maria answered quickly. “I’ve called four times.”“And?”“No answer.”Catherine stared at her.It was nearly one in the morning.Leslie had been ordered to return before nine.Four hours.Four hours was too long.“She knows she was supposed to be back before the meeting ended,” Catherine snapped. “She knew what I told her.”“Yes, ma’am.”“So why the hell are you standing here telling me she isn’t answering?”“I don’t know, ma’am.”Catherine let out a sharp, humorless breath.“Then call her again.”Maria immediately picked up her phone and dialed Leslie’s number.Catherine paced once across the room.Then back.Her irritation had already passed the point of simple annoyance. Leslie was not important enough

She was dressed. Not in the casual clothes of someone who had been woken by a disturbance, but dressed, which meant she had not been asleep, which meant she had been waiting. She looked at Leslie the way she rarely looked at Leslie, directly and completely, taking in the jacket and the dirty shoes and the scratch on the palm and the general appearance of someone who had been through something in the hours since they left this house.Leslie held very still under the look.Then Catherine’s expression did something unexpected. It settled. Not into warmth, Catherine did not do warmth, but into a kind of control that was different from her usual control. More deliberate. More internal.She walked into the kitchen and stopped on the other side of the table.“Where were you?” she said.“I was taken,” Leslie said. “On the way to the store. Someone stopped me. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know why.”“How many people?”“Two. Maybe three. I’m not sure.”“Men?”“Yes.”“What did they want?”“I don

Victoria arrived the way she always arrived, with purpose and with people behind her.Two assistants from the design house she had been working with followed her through the front entrance carrying garment bags over both arms, and a third woman brought up the rear with a collection of flat boxes stacked carefully against her chest. Victoria had spent the morning pulling together pieces she thought Tony should see, things she had specifically chosen with him in mind, and she had decided that arriving with them was better than calling ahead because calling ahead gave people the option of saying not today.She walked in without that option being available to anyone.The house felt different the moment she was inside it.She noticed it before she could name it. The entrance hall looked exactly as it always did, everything in its correct place, nothing visibly changed, but the atmosphere was off. A member of the household staff passed through the corridor ahead of her and moved too quickly