Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha's Regret: Divorced Luna Crowned Queen: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Travis' POVThe war room still smelled like the last Alpha who used it, cedar and old paper, a smell I never managed to shake in a few days of sitting behind that desk. I couldn't tell if the smell was permanent or if Ian never used the room in the three years he was married to Diana.Dale Webb sat across from me now, a broad-shouldered warrior pushing sixty with a scar cutting through one eyebrow, the kind of man who trained half the fighters currently on patrol and answered to nobody easily. Two council members flanked him, Halvard and Odette, both silent so far, both watching me with the same flat, assessing expression."You want to move patrol rotations to a six hour cycle." Dale tossed the schedule back across the table at me. "That's going to burn through the border unit faster than the threats we're trying to prevent.""Eight hours is too long in that heat. Men make mistakes on hour seven.""Men who've run this patrol for fifteen years know their own limits better than someone

Brielle's POVThe closet still smelled like him, cedar and something sharper underneath it, and I hated that I noticed. Two months of living here, and the closet still felt like it belonged to someone who might walk back into it any day. I pulled a shoebox down from the top shelf, tucked behind a stack of winter sweaters in a spot that had no reason to hold anything at all. Not one of the moving boxes I'd been sorting through for weeks since he moved out of Diana's mansion. Something separate. Something kept apart from the rest on purpose.I almost put it back without opening it. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn't meant for me to find, and some old instinct told me that not knowing might hurt less than knowing would. But I'd spent two years training myself out of that particular kind of restraint, and curiosity won the way it always did. I told myself I was just looking for a missing sweater, though even that lie felt thin as I lifted the lid.Inside sat a small stack of folded paper,

Travis' POVThe metal wrapped in the scorched cloth was a warrior's shoulder clasp, the kind stitched onto a border uniform, and it had no business lying in the dirt behind a grain store that had no reason to burn.I closed my fist around it before the young warrior could get a second look."You did right to bring me this," I told him. "Now forget you found it. Can you do that?""Yes, Alpha Consort.""Good. Go get that arm seen to."He went, cradling the cut against his ribs, and I stayed where I was, the clasp biting into my blistered palm. My eyes moved across what was left. Black frame. Cooling ash. Smoke still curling up off six months of the pack's food.Dale came up beside me, soot smeared across half his face, his voice worn down to gravel from shouting all night."Talk to me," he said. "What's in your hand?""Nothing I want said out loud yet.""That's not an answer.""It's the only one you're getting while we're standing in the open." I turned so my back was to the men working

Diana's POVThe council hall had not been this full since my father's funeral.I walked in with my chin up and Travis half a step behind me, and I felt every eye in the room turn, felt the whispers ripple down the benches like wind through tall grass. Reyes sat at the front with two elders flanking him. Halvard on one side. Odette on the other. And at the far end of the long table, calm as still water, folded and patient, sat Beta Turner.I had not expected him.My father trusted that man for thirty years. He'd carried me on his shoulders when I was six. Yet something in the way he sat there, hands clasped, face arranged into perfect concern, made the back of my neck prickle without my understanding why."Luna Diana." Reyes rose. "We did not expect you to come.""You called a session to question my husband's fitness to serve this pack." I took the seat at the head of the table, the chair that was mine by blood, and let its weight settle before I said another word. "Where else would I

Diana's POVI made it as far as the garden before my legs stopped agreeing to hold me up."Diana." Travis caught my elbow and steered me to the stone bench beneath the old willow, the one my mother planted before I was born. "Sit. Breathe.""I just promised them a shift." A laugh came out of me, thin and cracked. "In eleven days. I promised a council of wolves I'd shift, when I've spent my whole life failing at it in private, with no one even watching.""Then we find a way.""There is no way. Do you think I haven't tried?" The words spilled out faster than I could stop them, years of them, dammed up and finally breaking loose. "Every full moon since I was thirteen. Every trainer my father hired from every pack that would send one. Every ritual. Every fast. Every night I stood in that clearing alone until sunrise, begging the goddess to give me what she handed every other pup in this pack for free." My voice cracked. "Nothing. Not once. Not even a flicker."Travis sat beside me, close