The Alpha Regrets: She's Now the Lycan Queen

Chapter 9: The Alpha's Regret Begins

Damon hadn't slept in four days.

This wasn't entirely new. He'd gone through periods of insomnia before—after his mother's death, after particularly bad border conflicts, after nights when Fenris paced so relentlessly inside him that lying still felt like being buried alive. He knew how to function without sleep. He'd built a career on it. Coffee, discipline, and the iron-clad refusal to let anyone see you blink.

But this was different. This wasn't restlessness or hypervigilance or the low-grade anxiety that came with being responsible for eight hundred wolves. This was targeted. Surgical. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw silver-white hair and a smile that wasn't a smile, and his wolf started screaming.

On the fourth night, he stopped trying.

His study was in the north wing, as far from the guest quarters as the Pack house allowed. He'd chosen this office three years ago for its isolation—no foot traffic, no casual visitors, a dead-end corridor with a lock on the door. Privacy was the only luxury he'd ever wanted. These days it felt less like a luxury and more like a prison.

He opened his laptop. Pulled up the Pack's internal records system—logs, reports, personnel files, medical records. Everything the Pack generated was archived here. Three years of data. He typed a name into the search bar.

Seraphina Blackwood.

The file was thin. Embarrassingly thin. Birth record: unknown parents, found at the Pack border as an infant, taken in by order of the previous Alpha. Classification: Omega. Medical history: seven entries—four treated injuries (collarbone, wrist, ribs, concussion) and three routine wellness checks, all noted as "unremarkable." School records: none after age fourteen, when she'd been pulled from the Pack academy to work full-time in the kitchens. Work assignments: kitchens, laundry, cleaning detail.

No photographs except the one already in his desk drawer.

No disciplinary notes, which meant she'd never been reported for anything. No commendations, which meant she'd never been noticed for anything. No emergency contact, which meant there was no one who'd claim her if something happened.

He'd run this search before. Six months after she vanished. He'd told himself it was administrative—an Omega had left Pack territory without authorization, and as Alpha, he needed to document it. He'd read the file once, closed it, and locked any further inquiry behind the justification that she was gone and no longer his problem.

He opened the medical records. Clicked on the first entry. Age seven. Fractured clavicle. Cause listed as "fall." Treated by Dr. Harmon. Recovery: four weeks.

The second entry. Age nine. Fractured left wrist. Cause listed as "fall." Same doctor. Same vague language.

Third. Age twelve. Two cracked ribs. "Fall."

Fourth. Age fifteen. Concussion. "Fall."

Four injuries in eight years, all attributed to falls. All treated by the same doctor who never filed a single follow-up report. Never referred her to anyone. Never asked the question that any medical professional with a functioning conscience should have asked: Why does this child keep falling?

Damon stared at the screen. His reflection stared back—gray eyes, dark circles, a jaw that hadn't unclenched in days. He knew what these records meant. He'd seen this pattern before, in other Packs, in the case files that crossed his desk when neighboring Alphas needed help adjudicating disputes. Repeated "accidental" injuries with no witness statements and no investigation. The paperwork of a child being beaten by someone no one wanted to accuse.

He clicked back to the personnel file. Noted the date she'd been reassigned from the Pack academy to kitchens. Cross-referenced it. The date landed six months after Marcus Thorne—Damon's father—had taken a new mate: Patricia Sinclair. Victoria's mother. The new Luna.

Damon closed his eyes. Fenris went quiet for the first time in days, which was somehow worse than the howling.

He opened a new search. Pull logs: anyone who'd filed reports about Seraphina Blackwood's welfare. There were none. He searched for complaints, concerns, flags—anything that would indicate someone had noticed, someone had cared, someone had done the bare minimum.

Nothing. Zero records. In twelve years of living in this compound, not one person had filed a single document acknowledging that something was wrong.

Including him.

He'd been Alpha for less than a year when she left, but he'd been here. He'd lived in this Pack house. He'd walked these corridors, eaten in this dining hall, trained in the yard fifty feet from the kitchen where she worked. He'd known there was an Omega named Seraphina who cleaned things and said "sorry, ma'am" and kept her head down. He'd known it the way you know there's a furnace in the basement—present, functional, beneath notice.

He hadn't noticed.

Damon stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again. Walked to the window. The compound was dark—it was past two in the morning, and the only lights were the patrol towers on the perimeter, their beams sweeping the tree line in slow arcs. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass.

We hurt her, Fenris said. Not accusing. Tired. The voice of an animal that has been pacing so long its paws are raw. We didn't just reject her. We left her in a place that was hurting her and we didn't see it because we didn't look.

Damon didn't answer. There was nothing to answer with.

He went back to the laptop. Opened another database—this one external, the inter-Pack intelligence network that Alphas used to share information about rogue activity, territory disputes, and persons of interest. He typed: Seraphina Ravencrest.

The results loaded slowly. When they did, he leaned back in his chair and read, and the more he read, the less he breathed.

Lycan Kingdom press releases—limited, carefully controlled, never featuring a photograph. References to "a member of the royal family" joining the Ravencrest court. Training records from the Lycan military academy: classified, but the summary page noted that the subject had completed advanced combat certification in eighteen months. Standard time: three years.

A medical intake report from her arrival at the Lycan border, partially redacted but readable in patches. Internal hemorrhaging. Multiple sites. Damage consistent with mate bond severance, complicated by extreme physical exertion and environmental exposure. Estimated blood loss: forty percent of total volume. Prognosis on intake: guarded. Treatment duration: three weeks in critical care.

Forty percent blood loss. Critical care. Three weeks.

She'd almost died. Not metaphorically, not dramatically, not in the fuzzy cinematic way that injuries played out in stories. She had lost forty percent of her blood and been classified as "guarded," which was medical language for "we're not sure this one's going to make it."

Because of him. Because he'd said seven words in a room full of candles and torn the bond out of her body like pulling a nail from wet wood.

Damon closed the laptop. He sat in the dark and listened to Fenris whimpering. Not howling now. Not snarling. Whimpering—the sound a wolf makes when it's lying beside something it broke and doesn't know how to fix.

A knock on the door.

"Damon?" Victoria's voice, muffled by the wood. Soft, concerned, pitched at the frequency she used when she wanted something. "I saw your light was on. Can I come in?"

She didn't wait for an answer. She never waited for an answer. The door opened and she was there—silk robe, bare feet, blond hair loose, the kind of entrance that was designed to look spontaneous and wasn't. She'd done this before. Dozens of times. The late-night visit, the soft voice, the availability. It had never worked—he'd never touched her, never kissed her, never given her anything beyond proximity and the absence of a direct refusal—but she kept showing up, kept performing, kept treating his silence as permission.

He'd never minded. Or rather, he'd never minded enough to stop it. Victoria was useful. She handled Pack social functions, managed the other ranked wolves' mates, kept the domestic machinery running. She was also the daughter of his father's Luna, which meant refusing her outright would create a political problem he didn't want to deal with. So he let her orbit him, let her claim a closeness that didn't exist, let the Pack assume what they wanted to assume.

Tonight, for the first time, the sight of her in his doorway made something in his chest contract. Not attraction. Not affection. Something closer to nausea.

"You look terrible," Victoria said, crossing to his desk. Her eyes flicked to the laptop—closed now, thank God—and then to his face. "You need to eat something. I can have the kitchen—"

"Victoria."

She stopped. Her smile faltered, just slightly. She'd heard that tone before—clipped, final—but usually it came with an order she could follow. This time it came with nothing. Just her name, hanging in the air like a door being held open.

"Go to bed," he said.

"I'm just trying to—"

"Go to bed."

She stood there for a moment, recalculating. He watched her do it—the quick assessment, the reshuffling of approach, the decision tree branching in real time. Push harder? Show vulnerability? Escalate to tears? He'd seen every version. Tonight he couldn't stomach any of them.

Something in his expression must have communicated this, because she left. No argument, no tears, no door-slam. Just a quiet retreat, silk robe whispering down the corridor, bare feet on cold stone. She pulled the door shut behind her.

The click echoed.

Damon sat in the dark and thought about a girl who'd served him dinner hundreds of times, who'd walked past him in corridors with her head down and her bruises hidden, who'd stood in front of him at a ceremony and asked for the only thing a mate could ask for—to be acknowledged—and he'd answered by destroying her in public and never once checking to see if she survived.

He thought about this until dawn started graying the windows, and then a knock came again.

This one was different. Sharp, brisk, no performance. A soldier's knock.

"Come in."

Garrett. One of his patrol leaders. The same one who'd—Damon's stomach turned—chased Sera to a cliff three years ago. Garrett stood at attention and didn't meet his Alpha's eyes, which meant he was carrying information he didn't want to carry.

"Sir. You asked for a report on the Lycan delegation's movements."

"Go ahead."

"The princess spent the morning in the training yard. Sparred with one of her guards. She's—" Garrett paused. Swallowed. "She's fast, sir. Very fast."

"Is that what you came to tell me?"

"No, sir." Garrett shifted his weight. "The Lycan prince arrived an hour ago. Kael Ravencrest. He wasn't on the original delegation manifest—came in with a separate escort. Four riders."

Damon's jaw tightened. "And?"

"He went directly to the princess's quarters. They've been together since his arrival. The guards say—" Another pause. "Sir, the prince appears to be... familiar with her. Personally familiar. He brought her flowers."

The silence that followed lasted long enough for Garrett to start sweating.

"What kind?" Damon asked.

"Sir?"

"What kind of flowers."

"I—white roses, sir. And he—sir, he kissed her hand when he arrived. In front of the entire courtyard."

Inside Damon's chest, Fenris let out a sound that was not a howl and not a snarl but something between the two—a rattling, guttural vibration that shook his ribcage from the inside out. His vision flickered. Gray to red to gray. His fingers, resting on the desk, left grooves in the wood.

"Thank you, Garrett. Dismissed."

Garrett left. Quickly.

Damon sat at his desk and stared at the grooves his fingers had carved into the wood. Five parallel lines, each a quarter-inch deep. He hadn't meant to do that. He hadn't felt himself doing it.

Flowers, Fenris said, and the word sounded like a death sentence. He brought her flowers. He kissed her hand. He's in her room right now. Sitting with her. Talking to her. Being close to her. While we sit in this office and—

"I know," Damon said.

She's ours.

"She's not ours. I made sure of that."

You failed. The bond is alive. She's ours, and that— that prince is—

Fenris couldn't finish. The wolf dissolved into a howl so raw and sustained that Damon had to grip the edge of the desk with both hands to keep from shifting right there in his study.

When it passed—and it took a while—he looked at the five grooves in the wood. At his own hands, shaking. At the photograph of a brown-haired girl that was still sitting face-up on his desk where he'd left it four days ago.

White roses. Kissed her hand. Personally familiar.

Damon opened the bottom desk drawer. Under the files, under the maps, he found the one thing he'd been looking for without admitting it: a bottle of bourbon, unopened, three years old. He'd bought it the day she disappeared and never opened it.

He opened it now.

He poured a glass, didn't drink it, and sat there looking at the amber liquid while dawn crept across the floor and a Lycan prince sat in a room fifty yards away making the woman Damon had ruined smile.

The bourbon went untouched until the ice melted.

Then he poured it out and went to find something to hit.