Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 280 – Mommy

"Voren." His name came out of her mouth before she could decide whether to say it. "What are you doing here?"

She heard the confusion in her own voice and hated it, that slight unsteadiness that gave away the fact that she was genuinely thrown.

Her eyes stayed on him a beat longer than they should have, searching his face like the answer to a question she hadn’t fully formed yet.

His brows pulled together, that familiar tightening moving through his expression. He looked at her the way someone looks when they have walked into a room expecting to find it empty. "I could ask you the same thing."

The disbelief in his voice was real. As far as he knew, she belonged to Leon’s hospital, to a theatre, her own schedule. Her being here made no sense from any angle he could find.

Nicole had come in behind him and was now standing just inside the doorway doing absolutely nothing to pretend she wasn’t watching all of this with complete attention.

Her eyes moved between them, quick and sharp, her mind clearly running fast trying to assemble something from all the pieces that weren’t adding up.

She had already picked up on the strangeness of it, the red-haired woman referring to the child as hers, and the father being her fiancé’, and yet anyone who knew anything about Voren Ashkael knew there was no fiancée. No woman. Nothing even close to that. It didn’t fit.

The curiosity got the better of her before she could talk herself out of it. "Mr. Ashkael," Nicole said, tilting her head slightly toward the red-haired woman who had followed Voren and was standing behind him. "Is she your fiancée?"

before Voren’s mouth had even opened, her voice smooth and unhesitating in the specific way of someone who had already decided what version of events was going to be

Voren said nothing.

didn’t push back against it either. He simply moved past the statement like it was furniture in his way and crossed the room to the bed, his full attention dropping

exactly where

things as they went. She looked at the girl, the way she should have the moment she walked in, without the professional distance she had kept

something you could talk yourself out of. It was just there, plain and obvious, like something that had been in

across the bed at the red-haired woman without softening it. "You should have called me

girl’s legs, one hand reaching out to smooth it. "I know. I panicked. She started shaking and I

the three of them, Voren standing, Jasmine sitting, the child between

cold and heavy dropped into

back down. This was not her business. This was not

lead that had gone nowhere, and she had known before she walked in here that the odds were not in her favor. She had known that. She had told herself that repeatedly

already turning slightly, reaching for the file

"Daddy."

sound of a child coming up through layers of sleep into a room

in an instant, replaced by something so unguarded it

quieter than Seraphine had