Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 248 - How dare you touch her?

Ravyn had told himself that things couldn’t get much worse than what had already happened out on that track, but how wrong he was.

He stood there and felt the full weight of it settle over him as he turned to look at the warriors still seated on the ground — Fred, Kevin, Diane, and Audrey, their heads tipped forward, eyes averted, studying the dirt between their knees with tremendous focus.

But the mockery was there anyway. You didn’t need to see someone’s face to feel it coming off them.

Ravyn’s jaw tightened. He looked at Fred specifically. Fred was closest to the gym, closest to a solution, and said, low and clipped, "Go get your car."

Fred was on his feet before the sentence finished, and Ravyn watched him disappear with speed.

By the time Fred pulled up and drove them to the pack hospital, Seraphine was already moving through the ward from bed to bed with an IV line and a small glass vial in hand, checking charts, murmuring low words to patients, administering what they needed herself rather than leaving it to the medical staff.

She hadn’t missed the way the team here operated as Daisy’s allies, and she wasn’t about to hand off something this important to people who thought of Daisy as their compass.

Ravyn came through the door carrying Daisy, and his eyes swept the room in one fast pass. No Voren, no Damon, but he filed that away for later. He crossed the floor toward Seraphine and kept his voice carefully measured.

"Seraphine." He waited until she glanced up. "Please... treat her first."

He’d tried to say it right and still, she stopped moving and looked at him with a frown pulling at her brow, like what he said made no sense on any level she could locate.

"Why?" she asked.

Ravyn pressed his lips together. "You said yourself that her wolf might be sick. So please just check on her."

then turned back to her current patient and continued working the

She moved the line to the right position and checked the drip before she added, almost as an afterthought, "And are

in the room like something dropped

as he could manage, smoothing her

composure he’d been carrying into this room was

edges. "Why are you like this? Is this

ward went

slowly, and when she looked at him, her eyes were the kind of cold that has nothing dramatic in it, no storm, no fire, just a flat, clear absence of warmth that was somehow worse than either of

they have already made their peace

the ceiling, on their hands, on the middle distance anywhere

been something to file away quietly, the kind of thing you don’t speak about out loud. But this was different. The tables

limit. Every person has one, and he’d just found the edge

going to do it. It was the kind of grip that isn’t asking for anything, just taking it, and he felt her

dropped to something low and tightly controlled that was more unsettling than shouting would have been. "You need to understand

go of me." The words came out from between Seraphine’s teeth, quiet and precise, her free hand already

"Not until you apologize."

rims, and he would not even listen when

warned you this would happen. You’re standing here losing yourself over Daisy

Alpha was supposed to absorb, and Seraphine had been systematically walking past every boundary he had, one

don’t let go of me right now," Seraphine said as a matter of fact, pressing the needle of the syringe in her hand into his arm in one clean, quick movement and