Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 240 - I should never have let a third party into our private matters

The pack members stared at Bryan with the particular fascination people reserve for something they didn’t see coming, and his little voice rang out across the gym with a clarity that left absolutely no room for misunderstanding.

"They should run around the pack the whole day, screaming Mommy’s name with apology."

’You were right to forgive him,’ Marsha said in Seraphine’s mind like warm light through a window. ’He seems smarter than his father.’

Seraphine’s mouth curved slightly, but she didn’t reply.

Bryan had seen his father hand down that exact punishment before, had watched it play out from whatever corner he’d been tucked into, absorbing more than anyone had given him credit for.

Ravyn knew it too, and the faint smile that crossed his face carried a complicated kind of pride in it, the sort that comes with the uncomfortable realization that your child has been paying closer attention to you than you realized.

"So little?" Ravyn said, his voice unhurried, almost gentle. "You think that’s enough for what they did?"

The discomfort in the room had been building gradually, the kind that doesn’t announce itself all at once but settles in slowly, layer by layer, the way cold does when you’ve been standing in it too long.

Confusion had started to bleed into something more uneasy. Everyone in that gym had spent years watching Ravyn make his feelings about Seraphine perfectly clear, and the minds that needed this to still be about comforting his son were holding onto that interpretation with everything they had.

doesn’t forgive them," Bryan said, his small voice carrying a coolness that was almost startling coming from a child his size, "then they have

straightened to his full height, and everyone felt it. The way the energy changed when he stopped being a father crouched at his

of all," he said, his gaze moving across the room with the measured weight of someone who had decided exactly what was going to happen

down on a space and makes everyone in it suddenly very aware of where they’re standing and

at him. One look, brief and unreadable, and then she turned and walked to the nearest resting bench with the unhurried ease of someone

onto it and waited,

just near enough to watch, his expression carrying the careful attention of someone trying to read a situation before it

that had moved away from Alpha and toward something more personal and

a ripple of

were plain enough, but the weight underneath them landed differently depending on where you were

had gone carefully neutral. But her eyes were doing the math. ’Third party.’ The words sat in the

even counted on some small opening, a

process of rebuilding something he could eventually use to put himself in the position of investing in MindNest, of becoming useful

her wrong before, and he was reading her

water is unbothered by what happens on the surface. She didn’t look up from where she sat. "And I don’t have time to waste. I’m leaving for the lab as soon as my two hours