MY ALPHA'S REGRET

Chapter 4: The Border

Damien was moving before the howl had even finished echoing off the ridge, his whole body shifting into the coiled, controlled readiness of an Alpha bracing for a border violation.

"Mara, get her inside," he said, not looking away from the tree line. "Bar the door. If this goes badly, I want her nowhere near it."

"I'm not hiding," Lyra said, and the words surprised her with how little hesitation they carried.

Twelve hours ago she would have done exactly as told, would have let herself be tucked safely out of sight while the men around her decided what happened next. But twelve hours ago she hadn't stood in a clearing and watched her own hands turn to smoke. Something in her had shifted, permanent and irreversible, and she found she no longer had the patience for being managed.

"Lyra—"

"He rejected me in front of two hundred people, Damien. I think I can survive whatever he's come here to say."

Mara's hand closed briefly around her wrist — not restraining, just steadying — and something passed between the two women, quick and wordless, before Mara stepped back and let her stay.

Kane came out of the tree line alone.

He'd shifted back to human sometime during the run, and it showed — his shirt torn at one shoulder, his bare feet scraped raw from crossing miles of frozen forest floor without pausing to find boots, his amber eyes wild in a way Lyra had never once seen on the composed, controlled Alpha who'd rejected her hours ago.

He looked, she thought distantly, like a man who had been running from something far longer than one night.

"You're on Cross territory, Voss." Damien's voice had gone flat and dangerous. "Crossing an active border without invitation is an act of war between packs, treaty or not. I'd think carefully about your next move."

"I'm not here for a fight." Kane's gaze skipped past Damien entirely, landing on Lyra with an intensity that made the torn place in her chest ache all over again. "I'm here because I need to know she's alive. That's all. I saw her collapse in that clearing and then I saw two hundred people scatter like she was already dead, and I have spent the last four hours unable to think about anything except whether I—"

He stopped himself, jaw clenching hard, and started again with visibly more control.

"Whether the rejection killed her outright. Bonds have done that before. Rarely, but they have."

"She's very much alive," Damien said. "No thanks to you."

"I know that." Something raw cracked through Kane's careful composure. "I know exactly whose fault this is. I don't need you to remind me."

"Then why are you here?" Lyra's voice came out steadier than she felt. "You said everything you needed to say in that clearing, Kane. You made your choice very clear."

"I didn't choose it." The words came out of him fast, almost desperate. "Lyra, I didn't — my father has been dying for eight months. You know that. The whole pack knows that. What you don't know is what he told me twenty minutes before that ceremony, the thing he made me swear to do the instant the bond confirmed, before either of us had said a single word to each other in that clearing."

"What did he tell you?"

Kane's throat worked visibly.

For a moment Lyra thought he might actually say it — might finally hand her the explanation that could reshape everything. Instead, his gaze cut sideways toward Damien, wary and calculating despite the raw grief still written across the rest of his face, and whatever door had briefly cracked open shut again just as fast.

"I can't say it here," he said. "Not in front of him. Not on Cross land, where I don't know who else is listening."

"Convenient," Damien said dryly.

"I'm not asking you to trust me." Kane's eyes hadn't left Lyra's face. "I know exactly how that sounds, coming from the man who just publicly humiliated you in front of your entire pack. I'm asking for five minutes. Alone. And then I'll go, and I won't cross this border again unless you ask me to."

"Absolutely not," Damien said, at the same moment Lyra said, "Fine."

They stared at each other — Damien with open frustration, Lyra with a quiet, exhausted resolve that surprised even her.

After a long, tense moment, Damien's jaw tightened and he stepped back half a pace, though his silver eyes never left Kane.

"Ten feet," he said. "I'll be able to hear every word from here, and if his heart rate spikes even slightly, I will personally remove him from this territory, treaty violation or not. Are we clear, Voss?"

"Clear," Kane said.

Mara touched Lyra's shoulder once, a silent question, and Lyra nodded — *I'm all right, go* — before stepping forward alone into the cold gray space between the two packs.

---

Up close, she could see it properly for the first time — the toll the rejection had taken on him too.

His skin had gone pale beneath its usual warm color, faint dark shadows bruised deep under his eyes, a fine tremor running through his hands that he seemed to be fighting to control through sheer will.

*Bond-sickness.*

She'd heard the elders describe it once, distantly, academically — a rare complication when a true-mate bond was severed rather than simply never formed. The rejecting wolf paying a physical price nearly as steep as the rejected one.

"You're sick," she said, before she could stop herself.

"It doesn't matter."

"It clearly matters. Look at you."

Something almost like a broken laugh escaped him, humorless and exhausted. "I've had worse. I'll survive it." He took a half step closer. "Lyra, listen to me. Whatever my father told you happened tonight — whatever Cross has told you about my family, about why this happened — there's more to it than either of them knows. More than I even understood myself until an hour ago, when I finally forced the truth out of him myself."

"What truth?"

Kane's eyes moved briefly, involuntarily, toward Damien.

Something like fear crossed his face — not fear of Damien specifically, Lyra realized, but fear of what saying the words out loud might set in motion.

"The Shadow-blood in you isn't a stranger to my bloodline," he said quietly, so quietly she had to lean in to catch it. "It's the same power my family has been hiding for three generations. My great-grandmother was Shadow-blood, Lyra. She died because of what she was, and my father has spent his entire life terrified of the same thing happening to anyone he loves. When the bond confirmed between us, when he realized what you might actually be underneath the omega rank everyone assumed made you harmless—"

"He panicked," Lyra finished, the pieces Damien had already given her sliding into place with sickening clarity. "He made you reject me to protect me. Or to protect himself. Or both."

"Both," Kane admitted, something breaking further in his voice. "God help me, both. And I let him, because I was too much of a coward in that moment to defy a dying man's last order, and I have been regretting it every single second since, in ways I don't think you're ready to hear yet."

The confession landed heavier than she expected.

She wanted to believe him — some desperate, still-bonded part of her wanted to believe him more than she'd wanted anything in years — and that desperation itself frightened her.

"You had a choice," she said finally. "Whatever your father ordered, whatever fear was driving him — you still chose to say those words in front of the whole pack instead of finding another way."

Kane flinched like she'd struck him. "I know."

"Then I don't know what you're actually here for, Kane. An apology doesn't put the bond back. It doesn't undo what two hundred people watched happen to me tonight." Her voice cracked slightly despite her best effort to hold it steady. "What do you actually want from me right now?"

For a long moment he didn't answer.

"I want you to survive what's coming," he said finally, his voice raw and honest in a way she hadn't heard from him since the ceremony. "That's all. That's the only thing I can still control. My father will die within the month — the sickness has accelerated, faster than even the pack healers expected — and when he does, I inherit Ironclaw with no one left to answer to but myself. I intend to undo tonight's cruelty the moment that happens. But you don't have a month to wait safely, Lyra. Renner already found you. The Vantor Alliance already knows. And I came here tonight, crossing a border at war-declaration risk, because I needed you to hear the truth from me before someone else told you a version of it designed to make me the villain instead of the coward I actually was."

Behind them, Damien's voice cut sharp through the cold air. "Time's up, Voss."

Kane's eyes held Lyra's a moment longer, something desperate and unresolved still burning behind them, and then he stepped back.

"I'll come back," he said. "When it's safer. When I've earned the right to say more than I said tonight."

"Don't," Lyra said, though the word cost her more than she wanted to admit. "Not until you actually have something to offer besides an explanation for why you hurt me."

Something that looked almost like respect flickered across his exhausted face.

He turned to go — and then went suddenly rigid, his head snapping toward the ridge behind him, nostrils flaring, every line of his body shifting instantly from grief into pure, animal alarm.

"Someone's coming," he said, low and urgent. "Multiple wolves. Moving fast, and not bothering to hide their approach." His amber eyes cut back to Lyra, wide with something that looked disturbingly like genuine fear. "That's not an Ironclaw patrol. And it's not Cross either."

Damien was already moving, positioning himself protectively in front of Lyra, every muscle in his body coiled tight. "Vantor," he said grimly. "They said thirty days. They lied."

"They wouldn't move this fast on their own authority." Kane's voice had dropped into something low and calculating. "Not without someone higher up the chain giving the order. Renner said thirty days like it was law carved in stone. Someone changed the timeline in the last few hours, and I don't like what that tells us about how badly they want her."

"Badly enough to risk violating their own Alliance's law on the very first night," Damien said. "Which means whatever they saw in that clearing frightened them more than a simple evaluation would require."

Lyra felt the cold settle deeper into her chest, colder than the mountain air alone could account for.

Twelve hours ago she had been a girl in a white dress, waiting to be claimed by the boy the whole valley agreed was the finest match in a generation. Now she stood at the edge of two packs' territory with her exhausted, bond-broken almost-mate on one side and a rogue Alpha she'd met hours earlier on the other, watching a war-pack advance through the dark.