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.

almost startling coming from a child his size, "then they have to keep going until

he stopped being a father crouched at his son’s level and became an Alpha standing in

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

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

then she turned and walked to the nearest resting bench with the unhurried ease of someone who had decided in advance not to

and waited, back

expression carrying the careful attention of someone trying to read a situation before

and toward something more personal and harder to produce. "I’m sorry for not seeing it sooner. I should never have

face, a ripple of it, spreading outward from where he stood. Nobody was quite

the weight underneath

But her eyes were doing the math. ’Third party.’ The words sat in the room without a name attached to them, and everyone

counted on some small opening, a crack in

could eventually use to put himself in the position of investing in MindNest, of becoming useful to her again, of finding his way back

her wrong before, and he was reading her

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 are