Alpha's Regret: Losing his True Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Signed Without Reading
Lucan signs forty papers in front of the council because Camille's plane lands soon, and one of them is Ada's resignation. She packs her desk and leaves; Camille hugs her at the door. The council roll now lists her as dismissed, which she never wrote.
Lucan signed my resignation in front of three council elders and never once looked down.
He had his phone against his ear and his eyes on the clock over the hall doors.
"Eleven forty," he said into it. "Gate B. I'll meet her myself."
I stood at his elbow and turned the pages of the stack the way I had turned them every Monday for five years.
Page thirty-seven was a fence repair bill. Page thirty-eight was my name.
Four lines, my signature, the words effective today.
I had put it in the pile at seven that morning and watched the clock all day since.
Lucan's pen came down on the line and moved across it.
He turned the page.
Thirty-nine. Forty. He capped the pen and tossed it on the table.
Nobody in the room said a word about page thirty-eight, because nobody but me knew it was there.
"Camille Deverell," said the eldest elder, a thin man who had known Lucan since his christening. "Seven years away, and she comes home the week before the moon. The Goddess has a sense of timing."
"She's my mate," Lucan said. "The whole pack has known since we were twelve."
"And the arrangements for her welcome?"
"Ada does the arrangements."
He said it to the elders. He didn't turn his head.
"Ada does everything," he added, and the elders smiled at that, and Kerensa, leaning in the doorway with a coffee, stopped smiling and looked at me.
For five years I had been his assistant.
For four of them I had also been the woman he took to bed behind a locked door and never mentioned in daylight.
Wolves talk about the pull toward a mate as an ache you can't ignore.
I had never felt it, not once, not even for him.
I had always thought that meant wolves like me, gammas with a scholarship and a dead mother, simply weren't given one.
My left side hurt under the bandage from Saturday, when a rogue came over the fence and I got between him and Kerensa.
Lucan hadn't asked about that either.
He picked up his coat and went out, and the hall doors shut behind him.
So I picked up my box.
It held a stapler, a mug, and a photo of my mother in her cleaning apron on the pack house steps.
I left the key to the villa on the desk.
I left the thermos beside it, still half full.
Corwin's housekeeper had brought it at seven, as she did every full moon, with a note that said for her nerves.
I had drunk it at that desk every month since my mother's funeral.
Kerensa caught me at the top of the stairs.
"Tell me that box is not what I think it is."
"It's my desk."
"Ada. He didn't even read it."
"I know," I said. "That's why I'm leaving."
Her face went through three expressions and settled on the worst one, which was guilt.
"Don't do anything today. Please. I'll talk to him at lunch, I'll fix it."
"You can't fix a man signing his name."
She grabbed my sleeve, then let go when I winced.
At the foot of the stairs Corwin Sterne was shrugging into his black overcoat, with the housekeeper holding the door.
He was the Alpha, and for five years he had been the kindest man in the pack to me.
"Ada, my dear. You've gone pale." He put a heavy hand on my shoulder. "You've earned a rest. Take it. The pack looks after its own."
"Thank you, sir."
"And keep drinking what the housekeeper sends. You've been run ragged."
I said I would.
The front doors opened before I reached them.
A woman came in out of the October light with a cream coat over her arm and a small gold chain at her throat, and a driver behind her carrying two cases.
She was early.
Honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, a face that looked glad to be anywhere.
She dropped her coat on the bench and put both arms around me, box and all.
"You're Ada. You have to be. Every email he sent me said Ada says, Ada has it, ask Ada." She laughed into my shoulder. "You've been keeping him alive for years."
Camille Deverell smelled of rain and orange peel.
She let go and looked at my box, and then at me.
"Corwin said you'd be gone by lunch," she said. "I'm so sorry. I hope it's somewhere lovely."
I hadn't told Corwin.
I hadn't told anyone but Kerensa, and Kerensa was behind me on the stairs with her hand over her mouth.
I carried the box down the pack house steps into the cold.
Halfway across the lot my phone buzzed with a pack roll notice, the one that goes to every wolf's account when a rank changes.
It showed my name, my rank and my picture.
Under them it said: Status: dismissed for cause.
I had written resignation.
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