Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 227 - Why are they bowing to you?

Seraphine had been on that call for a reason. Corvine had worked himself into a full-blown panic and she’d spent the entire drive carefully talking him back from the edge.

She’d been so completely inside that conversation that the rest of the world had simply ceased to exist for her. The trees rushing past the windows, the dark stretch of road ahead, everything outside that car had blurred into background noise she wasn’t tracking.

Which was the only explanation she had for how she’d ended the call, turned her head, and found herself looking at a fully grown, completely naked Alpha male sitting behind the wheel.

The dashboard light was the only thing keeping the car from being pitch dark, and she was grateful for that but still. There was a naked man beside her. That fact alone was doing something loud and uncomfortable to her nervous system, and she hadn’t quite figured out what to do with it yet.

"Funny thing," Voren said, eyes fixed on the road, his voice carrying the easy, unbothered calm of a man who had long since made peace with his own body and her expected discomfort about it. "You didn’t notice the rogue attack."

Seraphine snapped her gaze to the window. Trees. Dark asphalt. Nothing moving out there now. Not a shadow, not a branch. Whatever had happened was already over and already gone. "Rogue attack." She let the words land flat. "Why didn’t anyone tell me?"

His jaw moved once before he answered sarcastically. "You were busy but Ravyn was there, so we handled it." A beat of silence, clean and brief. "We had to shift, and there are no spare clothes in this car, so you’re just going to have to bear with me for a little while."

Seraphine turned firmly back to the window and kept her eyes anchored there. "Find a store," she said. "Convenience store, clothing store, gas station... I don’t care which. Anything. I’ll run in."

"Thank you," he said, and the way he said it made clear he actually meant it.

They rode without talking after that. Not uncomfortably, but just two people keeping to their own corners, respecting the arrangement without having to say so out loud.

Then a small clothing store appeared in the headlights up ahead, and Voren eased off the road and pulled over.

Seraphine already had her hand on the door when his voice came from behind her, quiet, unhurried, carrying no particular edge but landing with one anyway.

"Be careful."

turn around.

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kind of place you forget the second you leave it. Cramped aisles, shelving

moved through it quickly and without hesitation, knowing what she needed before she got there, pulling things off hangers and folding them under her arm with the efficiency of someone who’d done

at the car in under five minutes. Pants, shirts,

them from her, held them up, and turned the waistband over once, slowly, and then something moved across his face. Not suspicion exactly, but a specific, careful kind of attention. The kind that notices things.

heat that moved up Seraphine’s neck

voice steady, even if the rest of her wasn’t quite cooperating. "I’m not proud of it," she said. "I used to buy clothes for Ravyn. He never wore any of them so eventually I just bagged all of it up and threw

than necessary, and it said more than the words had. "I grabbed

quiet amusement had been sitting on Voren’s face was gone. He was still, not checked out, not distracted, just

lives without really knowing them at all, that Seraphine

picked up enough from the edges of things, to have a rough shape of it

wrapped so quietly inside something as small and ordinary as knowing a man’s clothing size

almost unbearably matter-of-fact about the way she’d said it. No bitterness sharpening the

said. Simple. Nothing attached to it, nothing reaching for more than it was.

do

unselfconscious ease of someone who’d spent a lifetime doing it fast and without an audience. Seraphine kept her eyes on the middle distance out the passenger window

Don’t worry

closed door when he was standing in front of one. "Thank you," he said again,