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."

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 they’ve

a leader long enough to have navigated complicated rooms, difficult people, impossible choices. But he genuinely could not remember a single moment in

at the people sitting on the ground around him, at Daisy unconscious in his arms, at 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

he said. His voice had gone quieter now, stripped

raised one hand and pressed her fingertips lightly to her lips, a

and irrefutable in his hands, he would find a way to reason around whatever she told him, to smooth it over, to give Daisy the benefit of a doubt he’d

about the assassins, about who had sent them

proof to back it up," she

with this particular stretch of ground. She pulled open the passenger door of Voren’s car, settled herself into the seat, and glanced back just long enough to make sure Bryan was

voice came quick and breathless behind her, the woman’s footsteps catching up in short, hurried bursts. "Luna,

was a particular quality to her

said, "or if Ravyn had believed the story you all helped push, would you be standing here asking

between them and didn’t move, and in that stillness, every single one of them understood what

after consequences isn’t really accountability at all. It’s just damage control, and Seraphine

its own confession, and every face in that small circle wore it in a slightly

the front without waiting

she said without turning around. "Why didn’t Daisy’s wolf protect her

quietly. Ravyn felt it drop into some part of him that he hadn’t been expecting

that he didn’t know. He had never pushed for a run with Daisy, partly because on 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 something that