Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 265 – Don’t kill him yet

Two options. That was all Seraphine had.

Jump — the same way Voren had, backwards off the cliff into the dark water below, trusting that the fall wouldn’t kill her and that wherever Voren had gone he was still breathing. Or stay up here and fight her way through however many of them there were.

She looked at the water, then looked at the faces in front of her.

Voren hadn’t come up and until she knew he was alive and whole at the bottom of that fall, she wasn’t leaving this cliff without a fight.

She stayed.

"We’ve been trying to reach you for a while now." The one closest to her spoke first, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone running through a script they’ve rehearsed.

His eyes moved over her in a way that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with threat assessment. "You’re well protected. Made our job difficult."

She didn’t ask their names. The way they were dressed in dark, layered, no pack markings, moving with the loose coordinated ease of people who did this professionally told her everything.

Rogue assassins. Hired, not affiliated. Which meant someone with money had sent them, and she already had a very clear picture of who that someone was.

She reached down and started pulling off her pants.

The reaction was immediate and deeply satisfying. Three of the four behind the leader stopped mid-breath. One of them made a sound, and another one made a different sound. A rapid, hushed conversation broke out among them in whispers that she wasn’t meant to hear but could hear perfectly well.

The leader’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t look away from her face. Points to him for that, at least.

on a dry stretch of rock, then reached for her jacket. Unhurried. Completely at ease, like she was standing in

said, her voice warm and conversational and completely divorced from the situation she was in. She pulled the jacket

The leader’s voice had an edge now, the kind that comes from watching a plan go sideways in

the pants and reached for

decision about the direction of this evening and

do what we were paid to do." He turned back to her, jaw tight. "All of

Seraphine smiled.

She left it, though knowing it was about to get ruined either way and she’d accepted that before

then the cracking

unmistakable sound, like green wood splitting, like something very large reshaping itself inside a container built for something smaller. The rogues took a step back without

white fur came fast. It moved across her skin in a wave, spreading out from her spine and rolling over her shoulders, down her arms, across her legs, covering everything. Her shape changed. The cliff seemed smaller suddenly. The sound of

Marsha threw her head back and

the water and the dark tree line and came back different, bigger, and

Run.

The leader’s voice had come apart slightly. He was backing up even as he said it. "A gifted wolf. Abort. Tell the others tell

Too late.

Marsha moved.

wind goes through an open door, fast and completely without effort, like the resistance they offered was more of a suggestion than

before Marsha’s claws made the question irrelevant. The blood on the rocks caught the moonlight and Marsha noticed it the same way a fire

shifts. Their wolves were big, above average, clearly selected for this kind of work, but it didn’t matter. Marsha was a different category of problem entirely and their wolves understood that on a level that went below

she was not particularly interested in making it

The leader hadn’t shifted.