Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 241 — I am no longer your Luna

The salary deduction had done what nothing else that morning had managed to do. All that easy certainty, and comfortable assumptions about where this was heading and how it would end, had quietly packed up and left the moment the numbers became real.

Smug expressions had gone rigid. Confident eyes had gone calculating. And almost as one, they turned toward Daisy because surely she would say something now.

Surely, she would step in. She was going to be their Luna. She had been the one standing in that corner feeding the whole thing through mind link, and they had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that that meant she was in this with them all the way.

They had absolutely no idea what was coming next.

"You all know how much my parents care for her," Ravyn continued, his voice staying even and unhurried, giving the room nothing to grab onto and use. "Had it not been for them, Luna Seraphine—"

"I am no longer your Luna."

Seraphine’s voice came in clean and well-placed, not loud, nor heated, carrying no particular emotion behind it. Just a correction, stated with the same calm you’d use to point out a wrong turn.

Ravyn swallowed once. "You haven’t been replaced. The title still stands."

The color left Daisy’s face in one complete, uninterrupted pull.

Then Seraphine spoke again, and when it came it was warm, almost gentle, which somehow made it land considerably worse than anything sharp could have. "In that case, I formally renounce my title as Luna of the Centenary Pack."

let that sit for exactly one breath. "Going forward, I am

went still in a way

for a moment behind closed lips. She had this particular gift for locating the exact point where you believed you’d found the upper hand and quietly moving it somewhere you couldn’t reach, all without raising her voice or

Or maybe he’d spent so many years not paying close enough attention that he’d let himself believe it had faded. It hadn’t faded. If anything, her time

though the cure mattered enormously. The investment. The connections. The doors she moved through in the human business world that he’d never once been

her credit for, and she didn’t need a single thing from him to keep

plain, unadorned

what you

she

the room, to all those faces still trying

is a major figure in the city’s business world. The fact that she made an exception to come out here at all is something every one of you should be grateful for. And

feeling its way across uncertain ground. "Alpha,

need confirmation," Ravyn said, without

Daisy’s hands had closed into fists, tight enough that her knuckles had gone the

another voice was already rising right behind

Everything stopped.

need volume. It had something better than that. "If you’re offering me respect because of what I’ve built, then it isn’t respect but it’s strategy. You stood

moment, unhurried. "I have no

the composed ease of someone crossing something off a list. "Thirty minutes

"Kevin. Diane. Audrey. Fred."