บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha's Regret: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Ethan's POVThe arrow hit the outer ring.I stared at it for a second, then reached back and drew another one without thinking. My form was correct. My stance was correct. Everything about the mechanics of what I was doing was exactly right and it didn't matter even slightly because my mind was nowhere near this field and hadn't been for the better part of an hour.I released.Outer ring again.I lowered the bow and stood in the cold morning air looking at the target forty meters away with the particular frustration of a man whose body was present and whose mind had decided not to show up. The archery field sat at the far edge of the pack grounds, away from the training yard and the patrol routes, tucked behind a line of tall oaks that blocked the wind from the north. I came here when I needed to think without anyone watching me think. The pack read everything. Every expression, every pause, every slight tightening of the jaw. An Alpha who was visibly troubled was an Alpha whose pack

Ruby's POVDr. Hartley looked up from her clipboard the moment I walked through the consultation room door.She didn't say hello. She didn't gesture to the chair or make the usual small talk that filled the first thirty seconds of every appointment. She just looked at my face with the calm, reading expression of a woman who had spent enough years in this profession to know that the story was always in the face before it was anywhere else."What brings you in today?" she asked. "And I want the full picture, Ruby. Not the edited version."I sat down on the edge of the examination table and pressed my lips together for a second. Emily was in the chair against the wall, hands in her lap, giving me the space to speak first."I had cramping last night," I said. "It started just after midnight. Painful. It was pulling in my abdomen. Not so sharp but very persistent. I couldn't sleep throughout the night. It lasted until around four in the morning and then eased off but didn't go away complet

Ethan's POVThe elder hall smelled the same as it always had. I had sat in this room as a boy watching my grandfather preside over council sessions with the quiet, absolute command of a man who had never once questioned his own right to be at the head of that table.He was at the head of it now. Still the head and always the head until he passes away.The five elders were arranged on either side of him. They watched me walk in with the careful, measuring expressions of people who had already discussed everything they were about to say and had agreed on the order in which they were going to say it. I recognized all of them. I had known most of them since childhood. I took my place at the opposite end of the table and did not sit down.My grandfather looked at me for a long moment before he spoke. He was eighty one years old but looked sixty. His hair was white and his hands were still which I found quite odd for aman his age."What exactly," he said, "are these rumors spreading throu

Ethan's POVShe didn't hear me come in because the music was low…something slow and melodic that I didn't recognize, filling the room with the kind of sound that had no sharp edges to it. The lights were dimmed down to almost nothing, just the warm amber glow of the two lamps on either side of the bed casting the room in a softness that was a long way different from the cold fluorescent strip lighting of the elder hall I had spent the last three hours sitting in.Vivian was in the center of the room with her back to the door and a glass of red wine held loosely in one hand, moving to the music in the unhurried, unselfconscious way of someone who believed they were completely alone she was her shoulders, rolling gently with the beat, her free hand lifting slightly at her side, her hair loose down her back in dark waves that shifted with every movement.I stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment. She looked beautiful. Watching her dance felt strange because it was something I h

Ruby's POV The night air hit me the moment I stepped outside and I stood on the pavement for just a second and breathed it in. Talking to Gerald had made me lose my brain cells.I took in a sharp breath. Fresh and clean air carrying the faint smell of the food cart that parked on the corner outside Venom's Bar every Thursday evening flooded my nostrils. My shoulders slumped. The street was doing its usual night things. I spotted a couple walking slowly on the opposite pavement, a taxi idling at the junction, music drifting from somewhere further down the block that was too far away to identify but close enough to feel.I started walking, my bag's strap firmly placed on my shoulders. I didnt work toward the bus stop. Actually, I wasn't walking toward anywhere in particular. Just walking, the way I used to do in the early Silverlake years when the pack house got too loud inside my own head and the only thing that helped was putting one foot in front of the other until the noise settle