Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 247 - Maybe something’s actually wrong with her wolf

"Alpha, please don’t blame Luna Seraphine this was all Co-Luna’s doing." Diane was already moving before anyone told her to, jogging across the ground toward them with her hands out like she could physically hold the situation together if she just got there fast enough.

She planted herself a few feet away and said what she’d come to say, her voice carrying the kind of urgency that only shows up when someone realizes they’re about to get caught in someone else’s fallout.

Kevin was right behind her, nodding before he even started talking. "She’s the whole reason we got punished in the first place. She kept mind linking us, kept pushing us to go against Luna Seraphine. So please, just let her get treated and she can come right back out here and join us."

Ravyn was still crouched there, holding Daisy’s unconscious weight in his arms and looked at them both like they’d just handed him something he had absolutely no idea what to do with.

Slowly, with the careful, exhausted movement of a man who had been carrying too many things for too long, Kevin lowered himself until he was sitting on the ground, whiles Ravyn was still holding Daisy in his arms.

He was upset, the deep, heavy kind that settles into a person’s chest and makes everything feel slightly impossible.

He already had more than he could comfortably hold, and now here was a pack member who was supposed to be in the middle of a punishment, sitting down on the ground in front of him like he had the luxury of deciding when they would and wouldn’t comply.

He opened his mouth.

"I think they have every right to wait for her," Damon said, stepping in smoothly before Ravyn could get the first word out. His tone was perfectly even, carrying just the faintest ghost of irony running through it like a vein of something cool through warm stone.

"Alpha Ravyn, everyone here knows you’re a just Alpha." He let that sit for exactly the right amount of time before he added, "And as your Beta, I stand right beside you on that."

others exchanged glances, and then, one by one, they all lowered themselves to the ground and sat. No one said anything else. They just waited, patient and unified in that particular way people get when

leader long enough to have navigated complicated rooms, difficult people, impossible choices. But he genuinely could not remember a single moment in his life that had left him feeling

Seraphine standing a few feet away with that expression she wore that told you absolutely nothing about what she was actually thinking, and he came back to the one thing that had

were things about Daisy," he said. His voice had gone quieter now, stripped of its earlier heat. "What

pressed her fingertips lightly to her lips, a small, unhurried gesture that said everything without using a

way to reason around whatever

the assassins, about who had sent them into

proof to back it up," she said. "Once I have everything I need, you’ll

settled herself into the seat, and glanced back just long enough to make sure Bryan was comfortable in

Audrey’s voice came quick and breathless behind her, the woman’s footsteps catching up in short, hurried bursts. "Luna, won’t you

unkindly. But not softly either. There was a particular quality to her gaze, the

gone the way they did," Seraphine said, "or if Ravyn had believed the story you all helped push, would you be standing here asking me that right

answered. The question hung in the air between them and didn’t move, and in that stillness, every single

that only shows up after consequences isn’t really accountability at all. It’s just damage control, and Seraphine wasn’t interested in pretending

that followed was its own confession, and every face in that small circle wore

front

turning around. "Why

didn’t sit quietly. Ravyn felt it drop into some part of him that he hadn’t been expecting to feel anything, and for a moment he genuinely had nothing

never pushed for a run with Daisy, partly because on the non-existence of the mate bond, that would make

every physical exercise he’d ever watched her go through, Daisy had found a way around the one thing that would have answered the question. She avoided it consistently with enough different excuses that he’d never quite added them all up into