Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 228 - You’re impossible

The outlanders had their own way of doing things, and once you actually understood it, the rest fell into place pretty fast.

Most of them were lone wolves — not rogues, not exiles, not wolves who’d done something unforgivable and gotten cut loose for it. Just wolves who’d made a different choice.

Some had walked away from packs that cost too much emotionally, financially, politically, sometimes all three at once, and decided the quieter life out on the edges was worth whatever they were giving up to have it.

Others couldn’t stomach the city anymore. Couldn’t keep their wolves dormant just to function inside a world that had never really been built for what they were.

"Ever wonder how they keep themselves supplied out here?" Voren asked, his voice unhurried. Seraphine went still.

She looked around the restaurant again, not just letting it register this time, actually reading it. The way the whole room had quietly rearranged itself the second Voren walked through that door.

No words exchanged. No signal given. Just a collective, wordless adjustment, like the room had known what it was supposed to do and done it. The eyes that had dropped the moment he appeared and stayed down without being asked.

She turned the whole picture over in her mind, started fitting the pieces together, and felt it click into place with that particular weight. The weight of something that probably should have been obvious a lot sooner than this.

He was their lifeline, quietly, for goddess only knew how long.

she said it. "Under the

near the center, currently occupied by a couple who looked perfectly settled and in no hurry

irritation, no flicker of resentment. They just moved, quietly and without ceremony, like this was a perfectly normal thing to happen on

waiter materialized at the table before anyone had to ask and had the surface cleared in the time it would’ve taken most people to pull

on me," Voren told him, nodding toward

straightened up like he’d been handed something valuable. "Alpha Voren.

already found Seraphine, and what was living in that glance was complicated in the way only recognition can

enough mouths and enough

Ravyn’s closest friend,

all of that exactly where it belonged. Behind

of her divorce hadn’t reached the outlands yet. It rarely did

this room knew, she was still

unhurried manner of a man who wasn’t making a production of it, just doing it the way you do things you don’t need an audience for.

"What makes you think fancy is something I

picking a fight, just the quiet push of someone who didn’t love being read wrong. She wasn’t sure

mansion, with white tablecloths," Voren said simply, but something strange shone in