All Chapters of The Alpha's Regret: Divorced Luna Crowned Queen: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Diana's POVHe turned to go. Back to Brielle. Back to the exam room where she was sitting with a doctor, dry-eyed, calm, already assembling the next face she'd need for whatever came next. Back to the woman who'd given him the rescue he needed, the tears, the crumple, the shape of a thing he could save, the only currency she'd ever found that bought his full attention. He was three steps away when I said it."Ian."He stopped. Didn't turn. His shoulders were high and tight and he held his body the way a man holds it when he knows the next thing said is going to stay in him."I'm going to spare you the slap," I said.Now he turned. Confusion on his face, genuine, because mercy was the last thing he'd expected from me, and that told me everything I needed to know about how small his picture of me had always been."I'm going to spare it," I said, "because of who you were. Not who you are now. The man you are now hit a pregnant woman in a corridor because his girlfriend told him to with a

Diana's POV I'd had it at the clinic, through walls, through a moving vehicle on the highway. But those had been spikes, sharp and sudden, gone before I could hold them. This was different. Lying in the dark with nothing between me and the silence, with the house quiet and my body finally still, it didn't spike. It opened. Like a door someone had been holding shut, and my hand had found the handle in the dark.It came in layers. First the house itself. The boiler in the basement, a low hum I'd lived beside for years without hearing. The clock in the downstairs hall, each tick distinct, the mechanism inside it clicking between the ticks in a pattern I could almost count. Rain starting on the roof, each drop a separate sound, not the blur of rain but individual water hitting individual slate, dozens of them, and I could tell which part of the roof they were falling on by the pitch.Then, past the house sounds, the living ones. A fox in the garden. I heard its breath and its footsteps a

Ian's POV Turner was quiet for three full seconds. I counted them. Three seconds of a man who never went quiet, who always had the next sentence ready before you'd finished yours, sitting behind his desk saying nothing."And the walk," he said finally. "She walked out on her own. Nobody helped her. She wasn't shaking or unsteady.""No. She walked out straight. Steady. Like she was leaving a room she owned.""And her eyes," Turner said. "Anything different about her eyes."I stared at him. "Her eyes?""Color. Brightness. Anything that caught your attention.""I don't know what you're asking me." I leaned forward. "What do her eyes have to do with the petition?""Everything has to do with everything, Ian. That's the difference between a man who plans and a man who reacts." He set the pen down. "Did you notice anything different about Diana's body? Not her face. Her body. The way she moved. The way she carried herself. Heat, scent, speed. Anything at all."Something cold moved through m

Diana's POV Three attempts. Two years. Each one learning from the last. That was a campaign, not a whim.But there was a fourth entry I'd never noticed.Not an access attempt. A document request. Filed six months before the first vault attempt, back when we were still married and I still believed he loved me. He'd asked the pack registrar for a list of everything stored in the Ruffo family vault, not access to the vault itself, just an inventory. And the request had been approved, because an inventory list wasn't the same as physical access, and because at the time he was the Luna's husband and nobody thought to question it.I stared at the page. He'd had a list. For two and a half years, Ian had known exactly what was in that vault, item by item, and he'd spent the next two years trying to get to it.The inventory itself wasn't in the file. It would be at the registrar's office, or in the pack archives. But stapled to the back of the request form was a receipt from a private records

Travis' POV James was quiet. He wound the tape tighter around his knuckles, slow, methodical, the same way he did everything."There's something else," he said. "Probably nothing.""Tell me anyway.""When you asked me to loop Sussy in on the protection detail, I pulled her pack transfer records. Standard check. She transferred into Oakwood four years ago from the eastern territories. Clean paperwork. Clean references. Good standing letter from her old pack's registrar. Everything lines up with what she's told Diana and everyone else.""But?""But I'm thorough." He sat back against the wall. "When I vet someone, I don't stop at the file they hand me. I ran her name through the border crossing logs. Not the pack transfers. The raw territorial entry records, the ones the gate guards fill out every time a wolf crosses the line, in or out. Most of them are garbage. Half-legible handwriting, dates missing, names spelled wrong. But they're complete, because the one thing a border guard neve