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.

was almost startling coming from a child his size, "then they have to

way the energy changed when he stopped being

someone who had decided exactly what was going to happen here, "I have something to say to my

that followed was the heavy kind that presses down on a space and makes everyone in it suddenly very aware of where

resting bench with the unhurried ease of someone who

it and waited, back

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

and harder to produce. "I’m sorry for not seeing it sooner. I should never have let

room was visible on almost every face, a ripple of

but the weight underneath them landed differently depending on where

’Third party.’ The words sat in the room without a name attached to them,

softly, maybe even counted on some small opening, a crack in

rebuilding something he could eventually use to put himself in the position of investing in MindNest, of becoming useful to her again, of finding his way back into a dynamic where he

before, and he was reading

Not cold exactly, just completely unbothered, the way deep 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