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.

take care of them," she said slowly, turning it over as she said it. "Under the radar. And when you actually need them in war,

the best table in the room, a large one near the center, currently occupied by a couple who looked perfectly settled and in no hurry to go anywhere, and the couple gathered their

without ceremony, like this was a perfectly normal thing to happen

waiter materialized at the table before anyone had to ask and had the surface cleared

me," Voren told him, nodding toward the

up like he’d been handed something valuable. "Alpha Voren. Always good to have you

found Seraphine, and what was living in that glance was complicated in the way only recognition can be. He knew exactly who she was. Luna

mouths and enough retellings, to land even out here on the edges

sitting down to dinner with Alpha Voren, Ravyn’s closest friend, like it was the most unremarkable thing in

all of that exactly where it belonged. Behind his eyes, behind the professional

news of her divorce hadn’t reached the outlands yet. It rarely did out here unless someone

still Ravyn’s wife. Still carried that name and everything

production of it, just doing it the way

one brow lifting just slightly. "What makes you think fancy is something

combative, not picking a fight, just the quiet push of someone who didn’t love being read wrong. She wasn’t sure he knew her well enough yet to be making those kinds

tablecloths," Voren said simply, but something strange shone in his