All Chapters of The Alpha’s Regret: Mommy’s Secret Triplets: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

60 Chapters

Chapter One: The Ceremony

The zipper stuck.Aria sucked in a breath, reached behind her back, and wrestled with it for the third time, fingers clumsy, palms damp until the metal teeth caught and the dress closed. She let the breath out slowly. Checked the mirror.The dress was ivory. Once. Years ago, when it had belonged to someone else, it had probably been a clean, bright white, the kind of white that meant something. Now it was the color of old paper, and the hem on the left side dipped a quarter inch lower than the right because the stitching had come loose and Aria had resewn it herself by lamplight two nights ago with thread that didn't quite match. You could see it if you looked. She was trying not to look.She smoothed the fabric down over her hips anyway.It was the nicest thing she owned. That was the honest truth of it.Below her feet, the basement floor was cold, the stone held winter in it no matter what month it was, and the single heating vent on the far wall had been broken since October and su

Chapter Two: The Rejection

She saw him the moment she cleared the doorway.Caleb stood at the front of the hall on the raised ceremonial platform, and even through a hundred and sixty bodies and the thick warmth of candle smoke, he pulled her attention the way north pulls a compass. Automatic. Helpless. She had never fully figured out how to stop it.He was in formal black. Shoulders straight, jaw set, saying something to his Beta with the easy confidence of a man who had been rehearsing this night for years. He looked like an Alpha already. He had always looked like an Alpha, authority sat on him naturally, without effort, the way it only does on people born expecting the world to arrange itself around them.Aria moved carefully through the crowd, sideways between bodies, murmuring quiet excuse mes that nobody acknowledged. The hall smelled of candle wax and formal perfume and underneath it all that dense animal warmth that meant pack, meant belonging, meant a room full of people who all had somewhere they sto

Chapter Three: Cast Out

Nobody escorted her back to her room.That was the thing she kept noticing; the small, procedural fact of it, as she walked the hallway from the great hall alone, the ceremony still audible behind her, Gregor's voice continuing its careful ritual as though nothing had interrupted it. As though the thing that had just happened was already filed away and finished.She supposed, to them, it was.Her hands had stopped shaking by the time she reached the basement stairs. She didn't know when that had happened. She gripped the railing anyway, more for the sensation of something solid than any real need for support, and went down.Her room was exactly as she'd left it. Lamp off. Cot made. The small square mirror propped against the wall still showing the same space, just darker now, the candle on the shelf burned lower. She stood in the doorway for a moment without going in.Then she went in.She changed out of the ivory dress carefully, unzipping it slowly, stepping out of it, folding it ov

Chapter Four: The Forest Floor

The forest swallowed the wind differently than open ground did.Out on the path it had come straight and purposeful, cutting through clothing and finding skin. In here it moved between the trees in broken currents, unpredictable, hitting her from the left and then from nowhere and then from below somehow, cold rising up through the ground into the soles of her boots like the earth itself was pulling warmth out of her.She kept walking.There was no trail. She had known there wouldn't be, the Ashen Forest wasn't the kind of place that accommodated visitors, so she moved by instinct and the faint logic of keeping the wind at her back, which at least meant she was moving in a consistent direction even if she couldn't have named it.Northeast, Bren had said. Nine miles to a road.She didn't know how long she had been walking. Long enough that the packhouse lights, which she had been able to see faintly through the trees for the first stretch, were gone now. Long enough that the cold had m

Chapter Five: The King in the Dark

He was enormous.That was the first thing her mind registered not his face, not his clothes, not the specific quality of stillness he carried, just the sheer fact of his size. He stood between two trees at the edge of her vision and he was the kind of large that recalibrated the space around him, that made the forest feel smaller simply by being in it.She did not move.He did not move either.The snow fell between them in that thin, steady way it had been falling for the last hour, and the wind had dropped to almost nothing, and the only sound was her own breathing; shallow, too fast, visible in small clouds that dissipated before they reached him.She could not see his face clearly. The dark was too complete for that. But she could see his eyes and that was the wrong word for what she could see, because eyes implied something familiar, something she had a reference point for. What she was looking at caught light from a sky that had no moon in it, which was not something eyes were su

Chapter Six: Waking in the Palace

The first thing she noticed was the ceiling.It was high, impossibly high for any room she had ever woken up in carved stone with inlaid panels that caught the morning light coming through windows she couldn't yet see. She stared at it for a long moment without moving, the way you do when your body wakes up before your memory does and there is a brief, merciful gap between consciousness and the full weight of everything that happened the night before.The gap closed.She sat up too fast and immediately regretted it, her head swam, her arms shook with the effort, and a hand appeared at her shoulder from the right side of the bed before she had even registered if someone was there."Slowly," a woman's voice said. Firm but not unkind.Aria let herself be guided back against the pillows. She turned her head.The woman beside her was older, silver-haired, dressed in a fitted uniform the color of deep charcoal. She had the precise, unhurried movements of someone who had been doing this, wha

Chapter Seven: The Deal

She stared at him."What does that mean?"Alexander moved to the armchair nearest the fireplace and sat, not quickly, not with any visible urgency, just settled into it the way a man does when he has decided a conversation is going to take the time it takes and he is prepared for that."It means," he said, "that the story you were told about yourself is incomplete."Aria watched him. "I was found on a pack border as an infant. There is no story. There are just facts.""There are facts," he agreed. "And there is context that was kept from those facts. Those are different things."She pulled the blanket closer without thinking about it, not from cold, the room was warm, but from the particular instinct to make yourself smaller when something large is moving toward you and you haven't decided yet whether to hold your ground or step back."You're going to tell me I have some kind of hidden bloodline," she said. "That I'm secretly important.""I'm going to tell you I have a theory," he sai

Chapter Eight: Caleb's Wedding Day

The flowers were white roses.Chloe had insisted on white roses, three hundred of them, imported, which had cost the pack more than its monthly food supply allocation and which Caleb had approved without argument because arguing with Chloe about anything in the six weeks since the Ascension Ceremony had proven to be a specific kind of exhausting he didn't have the reserves for right now.The great hall looked different dressed for a wedding. Softer. The same carved stone walls and iron fixtures, but the roses and the ribbon and the candlelight did something to the severity of the space, smoothed its edges, made it look like a place where good things happened.Caleb stood at the altar and watched his pack file in.They were dressed well. Smiling. There was genuine warmth in the room, he could feel it, the particular frequency of a pack that was celebrating something, that had decided collectively to be happy about a thing. He had built this. He had made this choice, and his pack was be

Chapter Nine: The First Year is the Hardest

The palace was beautiful in the way that things are when nobody designed them for comfort.Aria had been here eleven days and she was still getting lost. The east wing alone had four staircases, three of which led to places she hadn't been authorized to explore yet, not because anyone told her she couldn't, but because navigating a building this size without a guide required a confidence she hadn't earned yet and wasn't going to fake.She had learned two routes. The medical suite to her room. Her room to the small dining area where breakfast appeared every morning at seven regardless of whether she came down for it.She always came down for it. She was eating for four and she took that seriously.Her room was on the third floor of the east wing, not the medical suite anymore, as she had requested. It was large enough that her entire Silver Fang basement could have fit inside it twice, with a window seat that looked out over the palace grounds and a bathroom with actual hot water press

Chapter Ten: The Birth

It happened six months later, on a Thursday.Not dramatically, that was the thing nobody told you about labor, that it started as an inconvenience before it became a crisis. Aria was in the library when the first contraction hit, sitting in the window seat with a history text open across her knees, and for a moment she simply thought she had been sitting in the same position too long.Then the second one came fourteen minutes later.Then the third one came nine minutes after that.She closed the book. Set it carefully on the shelf. Walked to the door and told the guard stationed outside to find Maren.She was very calm about it. She had decided months ago to be calm about it, had made the decision the way she made most decisi

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