All Chapters of The Alpha's Regret: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Ethan's POVMarcus walked in without knocking.That alone told me something. Marcus always knocked. It was one of his fixed habits, one of the small consistent courtesies he maintained regardless of urgency or hour. The fact that he came through my office door without his knuckles touching it first made me look up from the desk immediately.He was holding a small notebook.Plain cover. Dark green He crossed the room without speaking and set it open on my desk directly in front of me, his finger pointing to a specific entry on the page without touching the writing itself.Then he stepped back and waited.I looked down.The handwriting was small and slightly compressed, the way people write when they are trying to fit more onto a page than the lines allow. Abbreviated in places. A word cut short here, a name reduced to initials there. But the entry Marcus had pointed to was neither abbreviated nor reduced. It was written out in full, deliberately, with the kind of careful precision tha

Ethan's POVI heard their voices before I saw them. Their footsteps in the lower corridor, moving with the particular coordinated urgency. I pushed open the reinforced door.Three guards were moving toward me from the direction of Block B. Two of them were carrying a stretcher between them, their faces wore the neutral expressions of men doing something unpleasant with professional composure. The third man who was walking slightly ahead, clearing the corridor he stopped when he saw me coming through the door."Alpha," he said immediately, straightening.I looked past him at the stretcher.Cole was on it. I stood still, my legs frozen. I was headed down there to see him and have a discussion with him.But there he was. Lifeless on his back, one arm fallen slightly to the side, his face turned at an angle that gave the vibe that he was dead. His shirt was dark across the left side although it was not uniformly dark. It looked more like the spreading of irregular darkness of fabric th

Ruby's POVI took a seat opposite Dr. Hartley. I had arrived at her office at 10 in the morning for an appointment I had booked over the weekend.She was already at her desk when I came in, her reading glasses on and the thick folder that was apparently my medical life spread open in front of her. She looked up when I sat down and gave me the brief, professional smile she always started appointments with."How are you feeling?" she asked."Fine," I said. "Tired but fine."She made a note. "Tired how? The kind that sleep fixes or the kind that sleep doesn't fix?"I thought about it honestly. "The first kind. Mostly.”"Mostly," she repeated, writing something. "Any cramping since your last visit?""No.""Spotting?""No.""Nausea?""I do have nausea some mornings. It comes and goes."She nodded without looking up. "That's normal at this stage. Your body is still adjusting." She set her pen down and looked at me over the top of her glasses. "Have you been taking the Nifedipine consistent

Ethan's POVThe Cole Mercer investigation had gone cold and this was the honest truth of it and I had spent enough time refusing to accept it. I had so much hope that I would finally be able to get to the root of all these mMarcus had said it to my face three days ago in the flat, direct way he used when he had decided that patience was no longer serving either of us. Worse of it there was no footage !o leads inside the pack that hadn't already been exhausted. No identify or name attached to the person who had held the blade that had gone into Cole's side at half past midnight and left him on that cell floor to bleed in the pool of his blood.Whoever did it knew this building, manipulated out surveillance cameras and maneuvered through our rotation gaps.I had been turning it over and over for a week now and kept arriving at the same dead end every time. The audit had given me Claire. Claire had given me nothing because someone had made sure of that. Poisoning her before we could ge

Ethan's POVMy grandfather looked at me the way he always did when he was deciding whether what he was hearing was the truth or a version of it dressed up well enough to pass as the truth. I held his gaze and kept my face completely neutral."Ruby went to handle something on behalf of the pack," I said. "She asked Vivian to handle things here while she was away.""On behalf of the pack?" he repeated."Yes, grandfather."He looked at me for a long moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together in his lap. "What did you want to ask me, Ethan?""It's about the Willowbrook summit," I said. "Since I'll be attending the summit. I'd like to take Vivian."His expression didn't change, instead I saw a flicker of surprise in his eyes for just half a second. "Why?""Because walking into a room full of regional Alphas without a Luna beside me confirms everything the elder council has been saying about this pack's stability. They'll be hearing rumours and they'll like to kn