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.

Unhurried. Completely at ease, like she was standing in her own bedroom and

her voice warm and conversational and completely divorced from the situation

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

the jacket down on top of the pants

two of the four had apparently made a private decision about the direction of this evening and were having difficulty hiding it. Their mission parameters

one sharp look and the whispering stopped. "We do what we were paid to do." He turned back

Seraphine smiled.

was about to get ruined either way and she’d accepted that

the cracking

like something very large reshaping itself inside a container built for something smaller. The rogues took a

shoulders, down her arms, across her legs, covering everything. Her shape changed. The cliff

her

explaining. It hit the rocks and the water and the dark tree line and came back different, bigger,

Run.

voice had come apart slightly. He was backing up even as he said it. "A gifted wolf.

Too late.

Marsha moved.

them the way wind goes through an open door, fast and completely without effort, like the

halfway out before Marsha’s claws made the question irrelevant. The blood on the rocks caught the moonlight and Marsha noticed

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 thought, an ancient instinct that said this thing is not what you are

stronger, and she was not particularly interested in making it

The leader hadn’t shifted.