MY ALPHA'S REGRET

Chapter 2: The Offer

Lyra's mother didn't lower her guard for a single second.

"You're Cross Pack." It wasn't a question. Her voice had gone hard in a way Lyra rarely heard, the soft, healer's warmth replaced by something flinty and old. "Damien Cross. The rogue Alpha who wouldn't kneel to the Continental Accord."

"I prefer 'independent,'" Damien said, real amusement in it, though his silver-gray eyes never left Lyra's face. "'Rogue' makes it sound like I misplaced my manners somewhere. I know exactly where they are. I simply choose not to use them for men like Magnus Voss."

"You have no business here. This is Ironclaw territory, treaty or no treaty—"

"I have every business here." His tone didn't change, but something underneath it sharpened, cold and precise. "A Shadow-blood surfaced tonight in the middle of a claiming ceremony, in front of two hundred witnesses. Within the hour every pack alliance in three valleys will know it."

He paused.

"You think I'm the only one who felt that power wake up? You think I'm the only one already moving?"

Lyra's chest still ached where the bond had torn, the black smoke long since faded from her fingers.

But something in her — something silent and folded small her entire life — sat up sharply at his words.

"Others are coming," she said. Her voice came out rougher than she wanted. "Tonight."

"Not tonight. Word travels fast, but not faster than a body can move through mountain terrain in the dark." Damien crouched slightly, bringing himself to her eye level without closing the distance. "By morning, every Alpha who's ever heard the old stories about the Ashwood line will start putting together exactly what happened here tonight. Some will want to study you. Some will want to use you. A few — the ones who remember what a full Shadow-blood cost the last war — will simply want you dead before you finish learning what you are."

"And you?" Lyra's mother's voice cracked despite its hardness. "What do you want with my daughter, Alpha Cross?"

Damien straightened.

For the first time since stepping out of the tree line, something almost gentle crossed his face. Not pity. Something closer to recognition — the look of a man who'd searched a long time for something and just, against every reasonable expectation, found it.

"I want to keep her alive long enough to become what she already is," he said simply. "And I won't pretend that's entirely selfless. A Shadow-blood at my side changes the balance of power in this entire region. I'd be lying if I said that didn't interest me."

His gaze flicked toward the distant glow of the Ironclaw bonfire.

"But I've also spent fifteen years watching what fear does to good bloodlines when the wrong men get to decide what they're worth. I'd rather be the one who trains you than the one who has to hunt you down later because someone else got there first."

The bluntness of it — the total absence of the practiced cruelty Kane had used in that clearing — landed harder than any gentle reassurance could have.

"I don't know you," Lyra whispered. "I don't know anything about you."

"No," Damien agreed. "You don't. And I won't ask you to trust me tonight, kneeling in the dirt with your bond barely torn and your whole life rearranged in the space of one ceremony. That would be a cruel thing to ask of anyone."

He extended his hand again. Patient. Unhurried.

"I'm asking you to come somewhere warm, with a healer who actually knows what Shadow-blood does to a body in its first hours of waking, and decide everything else once you've slept and eaten and stopped shaking. That's the entire offer. Tonight."

Lyra's mother's hand closed hard around her daughter's wrist.

A silent, fierce question passed between them: *do you trust this, tell me and I will fight the whole valley if you say no.*

Lyra understood, gathering the last of her strength to sit upright against the cold border stone, that whatever answer she gave next would decide the entire shape of the rest of her life.

She thought of Kane's face across the clearing. The grief in it, and beneath the grief, that terrible flicker of recognition.

She thought of black smoke curling from her own fingertips, and the word *Shadow-blood* rippling through two hundred people like a stone dropped into still water.

"I want to know what I am," Lyra said. Her voice, when it came, surprised her with how steady it had gone. "Before anyone else decides that for me."

Something shifted in Damien's expression — satisfaction, maybe, or simple relief.

"Then let's begin," he said. "Your mother is welcome to come as far as the pack border, if she wishes to see for herself that I keep my word."

---

They walked through the last hour of darkness before dawn.

Lyra's legs were unsteady beneath her, her mother's arm locked tight around her waist, Damien moving a few careful paces ahead — close enough to guide, far enough to give her room to breathe.

Behind them, the glow of the Ironclaw bonfire finally guttered out through the trees.

Lyra did not look back to watch it go.

She was still watching it in her mind, though. She suspected she would go on watching it for a very long time.

"And Alpha Cross." Her mother's eyes cut sideways, sharp despite the tears still tracking down her face. "If a single hair on her head is harmed under your protection, rogue pack or not, treaty or not, I will burn every acre of your territory to ash myself. Healer's oath be damned."

Something that might, in a kinder moment, have been a smile touched the corner of Damien's mouth. "Understood, Mrs. Ashwood. I'd expect nothing less."

Her mother's arms came around her one final time, fierce and brief, and then she was gone — walking back toward the tree line and the dying light of a night that had ended one entire version of Lyra's life in the space of a single ceremony.

Lyra turned to face the unfamiliar territory ahead of her.

New pack. New Alpha. New and terrifying uncertainty about what exactly slept beneath her own skin.

"Ready?" Damien asked.

She wasn't. Not remotely. But she nodded anyway.

The girl who had knelt in white ceremonial silk waiting to be claimed didn't exist anymore. And whoever she was becoming instead didn't have the luxury of waiting until she felt ready.

"You're not what I expected," she said eventually, mostly to fill the silence.

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Someone who wanted something uglier than you're pretending to want." She glanced sideways at him. "Rogue Alphas aren't supposed to be careful. That's sort of the whole reputation."

Something like genuine amusement crossed his face. "I built that reputation on purpose, if it helps. It's easier to run an independent pack when every treaty-bound Alpha assumes you're too reckless to be worth negotiating with. Reckless men get dismissed. Careful men get watched." He glanced at her, something more serious moving behind his eyes. "I've been careful for fifteen years, Lyra. I intend to be careful with you too."

"Why?" The question came out sharper than she meant it. "You don't know me. You said so yourself. Why does a Shadow-blood you met an hour ago matter enough to risk a war with six packs over?"

Damien was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer at all.

"Because I watched my own sister get handed the same choice you just made, twelve years ago," he said finally, his voice rougher now. "Different power, different circumstances, but the same essential shape — something rare woke up inside her, and the packs around us decided, almost overnight, that she was more useful contained than free. I was too young then, too powerless in my own pack's hierarchy, to stop what happened to her."

His jaw tightened, old grief surfacing plain on his face for the first time.

"I built Cross Pack, in large part, so that the next time I watched something like that happening, I'd actually have the strength to do something about it. Tonight, watching Magnus Voss order his own son to throw away his mate rather than risk what you might become — I recognized the shape of it instantly. I wasn't going to stand in those trees and do nothing a second time."

The rawness of it disarmed her more than any careful reassurance could have.

She found herself, despite everything, believing him.

"What happened to her?" Lyra asked quietly. "Your sister."

"That's a story for a night when you're not already shaking on your feet." His voice gentled, though the grief didn't fully leave it. "Ask me again once you've slept. I'll tell you all of it. I promise you that much."

They had gone perhaps a hundred paces into Cross territory when Damien went suddenly and completely still beside her, one hand raised in sharp, silent command.

"Someone followed us," he said, voice dropped to barely a whisper, his silver eyes fixed on the dark tree line behind them. "And whoever it is knows exactly how to move without being scented."

Lyra's heart slammed hard against her ribs.

There was only one wolf in the entire valley she knew of who could move that silently, that deliberately — and the thought of it, the impossible hope of it, sent the black smoke curling faintly at her fingertips once more before she could stop it.