Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 276 – But if Voren is the person who...

"There’s nothing there. It was our wolves, and that’s it. We both came back to our senses after."

The words came out so fast, stacked so tightly on top of each other, that Corvine didn’t even need to analyze them. Speed like that only happened when a person was outrunning something.

He looked at Seraphine’s pink cheeks and said nothing for a moment. Just reached across her desk and picked up a blank A4 sheet and a pencil.

"Hmmm." The sound came out low and thoughtful, the kind that wasn’t really agreement or disagreement, just acknowledgment that he had heard her and had formed his own opinion about what she said.

He started drawing.

"You know what, Sera." His eyes stayed on the paper, pencil moving in easy strokes. "The lies you keep telling? They work exactly like a hole."

She looked up from her screen.

He was already sketching it out, a wide, deep well, the kind with no obvious bottom. Then, with a few simple lines, a small figure began to take shape at the top edge of it. The proportions were rough and completely unbothered about being rough.

"Every time you say something you don’t mean, the hole gets a little bigger." He kept drawing, shading the walls of the well with quick back and forth strokes. "And one day it becomes so deep, so wide—" he added the figure leaning slightly toward the edge— "that when you finally fall in, nobody’s going to be able to reach down far enough to get you out."

He lifted the paper.

a small, clearly female stick figure at the bottom of an enormous well, arms up, surrounded by nothing. It was

that came out of her was real and sudden and she grabbed the nearest pen and sent it flying across the desk at him. Corvine caught it without looking up,

it with the pencil. "We should frame this actually. Put

"Stop."

"For documentation purposes."

"Corvine."

the pencil down and leaned back in his chair, and the playfulness in his face altered into something more honest. He observed her the way he always

Seraphine looked away first.

Of all the men that could have ended up in the orbit of her

under her skin in a way that felt different from anything she had a name for. Even Ravyn, back when things between them were still soft and she had believed in what they had, never made

a thought she immediately picked up

she said, more quietly this time. "That’s really all

Corvine looked at her.

had been there during the training session for the Santiago saga. He had watched Voren and Seraphine train together, then everything that happened

in her

she went

It came out quiet and direct, the way she said the things she had already made

question settled between

had pushed too far. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at her with an expression she had only seen on him a handful of times,