Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Nervous laughter rode under his words, but even Chuck could hear how desperate and thin it sounded. He wanted Voren to deny it. He needed him to deny it so badly it hurt.

Instead Voren’s voice turned so cold that the last scraps of warmth seemed to disappear from the air around them completely.

"Tell me why you swapped Sera and Daisy." Noelle’s heart stopped dead in her chest. Voren did not seem to be on their side as she had thought.

Her lips parted but nothing came out. Chuck stared at Voren as though the man in front of him had suddenly become a complete stranger, someone he had never known at all.

Then they saw his eyes. The color had vanished completely. Pitch-black, empty of everything human.

There was no warmth left. No hesitation, no trace of the Voren they thought they knew. Clearly, his wolf was in control.

Noelle’s stomach twisted so hard she nearly doubled over. Every instinct inside her screamed that they were in real danger now, the kind that did not end with words.

She slowly stepped backward, bare feet sliding in the snow, trying to put even a few inches of distance between herself and those black eyes.

Bloodfang’s gaze followed her without blinking. "I got no idea what you’re talking about," Noelle forced out, but the tremor in her voice betrayed every lie she tried to wrap around the words.

"Lose an arm each."

The leader of the outlanders obeyed instantly, no questions, no pause. Chuck and Noelle barely had time to understand what the order meant before the blades flashed.

Pain exploded through them both like fire and lightning at the same time.

A horrifying scream ripped from Noelle’s throat as the agony tore through her body and stole every coherent thought. Chuck’s scream followed right on its heels, raw and broken.

Their severed arms fell into the snow beside them with soft, final thuds, blood already staining the white ground dark red.

For several long seconds neither of them could comprehend what had just happened. The world narrowed to pure white-hot pain and the sound of their own ragged breathing.

Then Noelle looked down. Her face drained of every last bit of color. Her stomach lurched hard. Her body began shaking violently as she stared at what was left of her arm, the bloody stump pulsing with each frantic heartbeat.

"No..."

The word came out as a broken whisper that barely made it past her lips.

She clutched the bleeding wound with her remaining hand, fingers slippery with blood, but the pain was unbearable, a living thing that ate through every nerve.

Her knees buckled beneath her and she collapsed into the snow, sobbing through clenched teeth while the cold bit deeper into her skin.

Chuck was barely breathing. His face had gone pure white as he stared at the empty space where his arm had been only moments before. Shock held him rigid for a few heartbeats before the full weight of the pain crashed in.

"My human likes to play, but I don’t have time for bullshit," Bloodfang sneered through Voren’s mouth.

His expression did not change even a fraction. The black eyes stayed cold and flat. "I can take a leg next."

Chuck’s heart pounded so wildly he could feel it in his throat and temples. He knew Bloodfang meant every single word. There was no bluff left in those black eyes, only cold promise.

"It was all Noelle, I swear. I regret the whole damn thing," Chuck began to confess, the words spilling out because he could not bear the pain any longer and the threat of losing more of himself was too much.

His voice cracked wide open in the middle of the sentence. He swallowed hard, tears slipping freely down his face as his wolf fought to heal the catastrophic wound.

But the injury was too severe, and his healing crawled at a painfully slow pace, making every second feel endless. Every breath burned like fire in his lungs.

He could feel his strength disappearing with each pulse of blood that left him, and the thought of losing another part of his body terrified him more than he could put into words.

The moment Bloodfang’s glare landed fully on Noelle, all her remaining defenses shattered into nothing. The pride she had clung to for years disappeared beneath a wave of pure, drowning fear. She had never imagined, not even in her worst nightmares, that things would come to this.

"I just wanted Daisy safe. Ravyn was supposed to marry the white gifted wolf, and I didn’t wanna lose power. We wanted to rule through our daughter, so I set up the swap."

Her voice trembled hard enough that the words almost broke apart. Tears streamed down her cheeks unchecked as the truth finally spilled out after years of careful silence.

She had spent so long protecting that secret that admitting it now felt like tearing open an old, infected wound and letting everything fester into the open air.

"You got what you wanted. So why’d you treat her like shit after?"

Bloodfang’s voice carried such cold, controlled fury that Noelle’s entire body went rigid. The black eyes never left her face.

Before either of them could force another answer past their pain, his gaze sharpened even further, cutting straight through them. "And that witch. I wanna know everything about her."

Though Bloodfang held the reins, Voren still fed him every question that needed asking. The real difference sat in how they worked.

Voren’s human mind would have taken longer, circling around fairness even when the people in front of him had already proven they deserved none of it.

Bloodfang carried none of that weight. No soft edges, no sympathy slowing the blade. He wanted every answer laid bare and he would keep cutting until nothing stayed hidden.

Noelle knew down to her bones that if Bloodfang had left her alone with Chuck right then, the abuse would have only gotten uglier.

Everything she had schemed and clawed for had never given her the life she wanted, and now, with every ugly piece of truth getting dragged out of her mouth in the middle of the storm, she could feel the carefully built world she had fought so hard to protect crumbling right under her remaining hand.

The snow soaked up her blood, the cold ate at the open wounds. And the life she thought she still controlled was slipping away faster than she could stop it.

"I realized too late that Luna Kylie wasn’t even into the prophecy anymore. The second she saw Seraphine, she liked the girl and said she’d still let her marry Ravyn even if she wasn’t a white wolf."

Noelle’s voice shook hard enough that the words almost broke apart in the freezing air. She could still taste the bitterness that had eaten her alive the day she first understood it.

Everything Noelle thought she had locked down started sliding through her fingers like melting snow.

"It killed me that my daughter was gonna get raised by some lowly omega while the omega’s kid got to live like a beta’s daughter."

Her voice cracked wide open. She squeezed her remaining hand into a tight, blood-slick fist until her nails dug into her own palm. The humiliation still burned inside her chest like acid.

She had looked at Seraphine and seen every single thing her own daughter should have owned, the respect, the position, the soft life, the easy comfort.

Instead, Daisy had been the one shoved aside while that omega’s child walked around with everything Noelle had wanted for her blood.

The pain in the stump of her missing arm had dulled some thanks to her wolf working overtime, but the loss itself was permanent.

Nothing would ever grow that arm back. She stared at the empty space where it used to be, at the ragged flesh and the dark blood still seeping into the snow, and fresh tears streamed down her face. The freezing air turned some of them into thin icy trails that clung to her cheeks.

"So I took it out on her."

The words came out barely above a broken whisper. For years she had fed herself the same lies, that Seraphine deserved every harsh word, every cold look, every quiet cruelty. That she was only protecting Daisy.

Standing here now with her blood soaking the ground and half her body gone, Noelle could no longer hide from the pure ugliness of what she had done. The excuses tasted like ash.

Then, as if a desperate new thought had suddenly punched through the pain, she lifted her head and locked onto those pitch-black eyes.

"Wait, why do you even care about her? Shouldn’t you hate her guts for everything she did to you? She picked Ravyn over you, married him, and had a kid with him."

Noelle clung to the idea with everything she had left. If she could just spark Voren’s anger at Seraphine, maybe she could still save herself.

Desperation poured out of her eyes now, raw and naked. She needed it to work, needed Voren to hate Seraphine. She needed any crack, any opening, anything that might buy her a way out of the nightmare she herself had built.

Unfortunately for her, Voren already knew far more than Noelle could ever guess. And he wasn’t even the one holding the wheel.

A low, cold scoff rolled out of Bloodfang. "Tell me about the witch."

Noelle’s heart sank straight into the snow. She had failed. The bottomless darkness in those eyes reminded her with brutal clarity that she was no longer dealing with the man she had hoped to twist around her finger.

She was dealing with his wolf, and that beast had zero reason to spare her anything.

"That witch was my friend. She’s the one who helped me win Chuck over with a spell."

Chuck froze solid.