Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 245 – Sera! You have to die!

Thunder rolled somewhere far off in the distance, a low, grumbling warning that barely registered against the five people under punishment.

"Co-Luna doesn’t seem like the Alpha’s favorite anymore," Diane said, that sharp little smile sitting right at the corner of her mouth as they reached the open ground at the center of the pack.

She didn’t bother hiding the satisfaction she took from watching Daisy’s face tighten. After all, every one of them had made the mistake of holding onto Daisy’s words like they were gold, and every one of them had walked out of that gym carrying the weight of Daisy’s humiliation on their backs.

Daisy stood there and felt the tears pressing in at the corners of her eyes, hot and stubborn, threatening to spill, but she locked her jaw and refused to let them fall. She would not give them that.

Seraphine had not only walked away from the assassins sent to end her, but had turned the whole gymnasium into a stage and used it to leave Daisy standing in the middle of it looking like a fool. The anger that rose in Daisy’s chest was so thick it almost choked her.

But there was one thing she kept coming back to, one quiet thought she clung to when everything else felt like it was crumbling. As long as Seraphine remained out there in the outlands, the rogue assassins would find her eventually. They always found their mark, and that was Daisy’s solace.

That was the thing she pressed her fingers around when the world felt like it was slipping out of her grip.

Still, it didn’t stop the others from talking.

"Luna Sera doesn’t just have Alpha Ravyn’s attention anymore," Fred said, his voice carrying that particular edge of irritation that only comes when someone feels they’ve been dragged into a mess they didn’t make. "She’s got Alpha Voren’s too."

He wasn’t looking at anyone when he said it, just staring out at the track ahead like the words cost him something. He was already calculating what this incident was going to mean for his record, for all their records.

disappear. It sat in a file somewhere and followed you every time a promotion came up for review. A stain. That’s exactly what it was, a stain Daisy had put on

Fred with something between amusement and resignation. "The way Alpha

like that? She’s prettier now than she ever was when she was still

way, but in the kind of way that made you feel

there among them, and they hadn’t

growing restlessness of the group. The last thing any of them needed was to still be standing here talking when the Alpha or one of his

anxiety pulling at the back of her throat. "Alright, enough," she said, clapping her hands once. "We need to start the r—" She stopped. Something snagged in her mind, some thought she

like she was working it out in real time. "And that boy. He stood right up against his own mother." She shook her head slowly,

just a pretty face," Diane said, her voice carrying respect threaded through with the

buried under the annoyance, but guilt had a way of coming out

to cry. She could feel the pressure of it behind her eyes and in the tight space at the base of her throat, but crying here in front of all of them, in the

and kept her face arranged into something that she hoped looked like

scanned the distance. His voice had lost some of its bite, replaced by something

before they close everything up. And who knows, maybe if we actually put in the work, she might forgive us. My sister at the hospital said Luna Sera’s only staying for four days total. That means she’s technically down to two left. So we’re not exactly running with a

Kevin said, nodding slowly.

but there wasn’t cruelty in it either, just an honest accounting of how things stood. The others murmured in tired agreement

from all of it, and she felt

her thing. She’d always found ways around it, an excuse here, a convenient absence because the physical grind of it exhausted her in ways