THE ALPHA’S REGRET

CHAPTER FIVE

Two hundred miles away, behind concrete walls and razor wire, evening count hadn’t started yet.

The yard was loud, the way it always was. Shouting, the metallic clang of gates, the low electric hum of cameras sweeping back and forth. Devin Blackwell sat at a corner table with a notebook open in front of him, pen moving in slow, deliberate lines.

To anyone watching, he looked like a man writing letters he’d never send.

He wasn’t broken. He wasn’t even close.

Eight months in, and the guards still hadn’t figured out how to read him. He was an Alpha with no pack, no territory, no name that meant anything past these gates. But the thing in his blood hadn’t forgotten what he was. It had simply learned to wait.

“Blackwell. Visitor.”

He closed the notebook and stood without hurrying.

The visiting room smelled like bleach and old coffee. Most of the tables sat empty, visiting hours nearly done. Marcus Cole was waiting at the far end, gray hair, kind eyes, the posture of a man who’d spent thirty years choosing the harder right over the easier wrong.

Devin sat across from him. The guard by the door was close enough to look present and far enough to hear nothing.

“How are you holding up?” Marcus asked.

“Still breathing.”

Marcus slid a folder across the table, casual as a man passing the salt. “The transfer records you wanted.”

Devin opened it and scanned the first page, then the second. His jaw went tight.

“These are dated two days after my arrest.”

“Which means whoever moved that money had access to the accounts after you were already sitting in a cell.”

“Catherine.”

“Or someone she paid to do it for her.” Marcus kept his voice low. “Proving it is another matter. She’s careful. She’s had months to bury it deeper.”

“She’s careful right up until she’s sure no one’s watching.” Devin closed the folder. “That’s when she slips.”

Marcus studied him. “You’re planning something.”

“I’m planning to survive long enough to fix it.”

“There’s a difference between that and revenge.”

“Ask me again when I’m out.”

Marcus let that sit, then reached for his phone. “Your brother’s wife. I said I’d learn more about her.”

He turned the screen around. A charity gala. Tony in a tailored suit with a young woman beside him in a dress that looked borrowed from someone else’s life. She wasn’t smiling so much as holding still, the way people do when they’re afraid of drawing attention.

“Leslie Grant,” Marcus said. “Twenty three. No family money, no name that opens doors. She was waiting tables six months ago.”

Devin looked at her a moment longer than he meant to. “Why her?”

“That’s what I couldn’t figure out either.” Marcus swiped to the next photo.

This one was rougher, taken on a phone, badly lit. Leslie in a different dress, this one ruined, something dark matted through her hair as she fled across a parking lot with her arm half raised against the cameras.

Something low in Devin’s chest went still and cold.

“What happened here?”

“Someone set her up at a gala. Humiliated her in front of half the city.” Marcus’s voice hardened. “Tony was twenty feet away. He didn’t move.”

Devin didn’t say anything for a moment. He was looking at the girl in the photo the way he’d once looked at ledgers that didn’t balance, searching for the piece that explained the rest.

“Catherine needed him married,” he said finally. “Stable. Presentable to the board before he moved on Father’s shares.”

“That’s my read too.” Marcus pocketed the phone. “She’s not a wife. She’s a prop with a pulse.”

“She’s a victim.” Devin’s voice was flat, certain. “Just a different kind than me.”

“Isolated, from what I hear. Controlled. Not exactly living the life the tabloids think she is.”

Devin stood and crossed to the small window, watching the yard empty out under the dying light. Eight months of this view while Tony sat in his father’s chair and Catherine ran his father’s company into a story she’d written herself.

“I need to talk to her,” he said.

“Talk to who? Leslie?” Marcus almost laughed. “She doesn’t know you’re alive, Devin. And even if she did.”

“You said she leaves the house sometimes. Appointments. Errands.” Devin turned. “Find the window. Arrange it.”

Marcus’s face didn’t move, but his silence did the work of a dozen objections. “What exactly do you need from her?”

“The truth. She’s married to a man whose mother had his father killed and his brother framed for it. She has no idea what she walked into.”

“And you think she’ll take that from a stranger in a photograph?”

“I think she’s alone in that house and looking for a reason to trust someone.” Devin stepped closer. “She has access I don’t. To their house. Their conversations. Whatever paper trail Catherine hasn’t thought to hide from a daughter in law nobody respects enough to watch closely.”

“If she says no, she could go straight to Tony.”

“Then I’m exactly as trapped as I am right now. No worse.”

Marcus rubbed a hand over his jaw, weighing it. “This isn’t a small thing you’re asking.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

“If we do this, we do it my way. No pressure on her. No threats, implied or otherwise. If she says no, that’s the end of it. We disappear and never go near her again.”

“Agreed.”

Marcus exhaled through his nose, something between a laugh and a warning to himself. “I must be out of my mind.”

“You’re one of the only people in my life who isn’t.” Devin’s voice dropped, quieter than before. “That’s the only reason I’m asking.”

Marcus held his gaze a long moment, then nodded once and gathered the folder. He was almost to the door when he stopped.

“She looked scared in that photo,” he said, not turning around. “Don’t make that worse for her.”

“I won’t.”

“Then what exactly are you offering her?”

Devin thought of the girl standing alone in a ruined dress while the cameras kept flashing, of a house that would never once feel like hers.

“A way out,” he said. “Same as I want for myself.”

Marcus left without another word.

The guard came for Devin a few minutes later, and he walked the long corridor back toward his cell with his mind already three steps ahead, turning the photograph over and over.

Leslie Grant had no idea he existed yet.

That was about to change.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​