The Alpha’s Biggest Regret: Begging For A Second Chance

CHAPTER FOUR

Caden's Pov

I told myself it was the right thing.

I stood at the window and I watched Marcus carry her bags to her car and I told myself that every step he took toward that car was a step toward something honourable. A debt being settled. A wrong being corrected.

I gripped the windowsill and watched her move through the courtyard below — her head down, her bag on her shoulder, not looking up at the window, not looking back at the house — and every single part of me was screaming.

I didn't move.

She got in the car. Marcus stepped back. The engine turned on and the car started until it was out of my sight.

The bond snapped the moment she crossed the pack border.

I had been suppressing it for weeks — holding it down with everything an Alpha has, all that trained will and control — and I had not understood until that moment how much strength that had been taking.

When she crossed the border it didn't fade. It broke at the root and took half of me with it.

I went down on both knees, right there on the office floor, a sound coming out of me that I had never made in my life and could not stop.

My wolf screamed — not metaphorically, I felt it physically, in my chest and my throat and behind my eyes — and my vision went white and the floor came up and I could not breathe around what was happening to my own body.

Isolde found me. She came through the door and grabbed my arm and asked me what happened, what was wrong, should she call the pack doctor. I heard her voice from somewhere very far away. I got myself upright after some minutes. I straightened my shirt and told her it was nothing.

She looked at me with those wide, worried eyes and pressed her hand to my face, "Caden. Please talk to me."

I moved her hand away. "I said it was nothing."

She left it. I stood at the window for a long time after she was gone and I looked at the empty drive where Sera's car had been and I felt the place inside me where the bond used to live — raw and open and wrong.

I told myself it would end. That I would heal.

I wasn't sure about that.

*****

Sleep stopped working properly. Two hours, sometimes three, and then I was awake and staring at the ceiling and my wolf was pacing the inside of my chest with the relentless, exhausting energy of an animal that had lost something and could not stop looking for it.

I trained harder. I filled every hour I wasn't training with pack business. I signed documents and held meetings and made decisions and functioned completely correctly as an Alpha and something was deeply, visibly wrong and I knew it and I kept moving anyway.

My senses were dulling at the edges. That is not something that happens to a man my age and my strength unless something is genuinely broken inside him.

I didn't tell anyone.

*****

Isolde tried.

I will say that for her — she genuinely tried to be what the packhouse needed. She sat at my right hand at dinners. She attended briefings and asked intelligent questions and smiled at everyone with that warm, patient smile. She did everything a Luna does.

The pack tolerated her.

That is the only honest word for it. Before Sera left they had been following my lead, performing acceptance because their Alpha expected it. With Sera gone they stopped performing. They were not rude — they are too well mannered for that — but the warmth was gone. The omegas answered Isolde's questions and went back to their work. The senior wolves gave her nothing extra. Marta served her meals in silence.

Isolde came to me after the first week and said the pack wasn't warming to her. That she felt like an outsider in her own home.

I told her to give it time.

Two months after Sera left I walked past the east suite and saw a single peach sitting on the windowsill. Perfect, golden, sitting there like the person that would have loved it would see it. I stopped in the hallway and looked at it for a long moment. I didn't ask who put it there. Nobody would have told me anyway.

******

Isolde came to my room on one night.

She knocked and I told her to come in and she was in one of those soft draped things she wore in the evenings, her hair down, and she sat on the edge of the bed where I was going over pack documents and she put her hand over mine on the papers.

"We should talk," she said. "About us. About what comes next."

"Isolde—"

"We've been circling around it for weeks." She moved closer and her voice dropped into something softer and more deliberate. "This is what we were supposed to be. This is what we always should have been. You don't have to keep treating me like I'm temporary."

She leaned in. Her mouth was almost at my jaw and I could feel the intention of it — the direction everything was moving — and my whole body recoiled.

Not politely or gently. My wolf came up so fast and so hard that I was off the bed and across the room before I had consciously decided to move, and I was standing with my back to the wall and my heart hammering and something that felt very close to revulsion crawling across every nerve I had.

Isolde stared at me from the bed.

"Caden—"

"Don't." My voice came out rough. "I can't — just don't."

"What is wrong with you?"

I didn't have an answer. What I had was the knowledge, that what had just happened in my body was not about timing. My wolf had not simply been unready. It had 'refused' with everything it had, it had refused.

I told her to go back to her room. She went, her face something complicated that I didn't have the energy to examine. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and I stayed there for a long time.

****

Marcus came to my office later on, closed the door and sat down across from me without being invited and looked at me with the expression he reserves for fools.

"I don't know what you want me to tell you," he said.

"I didn't ask you for anything."

"No. You've not been asking anyone for anything for three weeks while you fall apart in slow motion." He leaned back in his chair. "She's gone, Caden. She took nothing, she asked for nothing, she just left. And wherever she is I genuinely hope she's doing better than she was in this house. I hope she finds someone who actually sees her. A good man who—"

"Watch what you say about my mate." I snapped.

The office went very quiet.

Marcus looked at me with a raised brow. "Your mate," he said slowly.

"Yes."

"That's what she is?"

"She has always been—"

"You stood in your office and told her she was in Isolde's place." His voice was completely level. "You told her your marriage wasn't fair to Isolde. You handed her divorce papers with your name already on them and you watched her sign every page." He leaned forward. "And now she's your mate. Now that she's gone and this house feels wrong and you can't sleep and your wolf is losing its mind and now she's your mate."

I said nothing.

"Which is it?" he said. "Is she your mate or was she keeping Isolde's seat warm? Because Caden you do not get to call her yours after what you did."

He stood up, straightened his jacket. He looked at me one more time with something in his eyes that was equal to pity and disdain.

"I hope she's somewhere safe," he said. "I mean that."

He left.

I sat in my office until the pack house went quiet around me. The wolf stopped pacing eventually — not because anything was resolved, but because it was simply too exhausted to keep going.

I just sat there.

Outside in the hallway, nobody had touched the peach.