The Alpha's Regret: Losing His True Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring on the Floor
Faye organizes her Alpha's engagement party, gets searched and stripped in front of three hundred wolves for a ring that was never stolen, and walks out of the ballroom; in her head, the Alpha says: Please.
Jarrett tapped his glass with a spoon, and three hundred wolves went quiet to hear him name Imogen Pinkerton their next Luna.
I stood by the kitchen doors with my clipboard.
I had planned every minute of that night in ten days.
Imogen had given me the job in front of Jarrett, with a smile, and he had said only, "Make it happen, Faye."
My resignation from my post took effect at the next new moon, nine nights away.
I had run the pack's household and its guests for eight years, and this party was the last thing I owed it.
Before the toast, Imogen had caught both my hands at the ballroom door.
She smelled of lilies, and her fingers were warm.
"Thank you, truly," she said. "None of this works without you."
Jarrett had stopped beside her and added, "Nothing changes between us, Faye. You know that."
I had said, "Of course," because that was my job.
Now he stood on the dais with his arm around her waist.
"Four years ago, Imogen's father and I shook hands on an alliance," he said. "Tonight we make it a family."
The ballroom roared.
Imogen lifted her left hand to show the room her ring.
It was the Brandis family's Luna ring, moon-silver with a diamond the size of a thumbnail.
It was too loose for her.
I had booked the jeweler twice that week to take it in, and it still turned on her finger.
She thumbed it back up the knuckle while Jarrett talked, and she did it again when he raised his glass.
Nobody else was watching her hand.
"To Imogen," Jarrett said. "Your Luna."
Everyone drank.
I put my clipboard down on a service cart and walked out the side door into the cold hallway.
I leaned my forehead on the plaster.
Eight years ago, in the pack kitchen, the night he took the Alpha seat, Jarrett had kissed me.
I had felt the pull of him in every bone, and the next morning he had called it nothing.
I stayed there until my hands stopped shaking.
Then I straightened my jacket and went back in.
The music had stopped.
Every head in the ballroom had turned toward me.
"There she is," Imogen said, and her voice cracked across the floor. "That's the one. She took it."
I stopped in the doorway.
Imogen pointed at me with her bare left hand.
"My ring was on my finger two minutes ago," she said. "She walked out and now it's gone."
"Imogen," Jarrett said. "What are you doing?"
"Ask her."
Two guards crossed the floor and took me by the arms.
"Let go of me," I said.
They did not.
"I was in the hall," I said. "Ask anyone. I went out for air."
"After you watched him give me this ring," Imogen said. "Everyone saw how you looked at him."
A woman near the front whispered something, and the whisper ran down the tables.
"Search her," Imogen said.
"Imogen, wait," Jarrett said.
But he did not step off the dais.
A guard ran his hands down my sides and over my pockets.
The other guard held my wrist so hard my fingers went numb.
"Be careful with the dress," I said.
The seam at my waist gave with a loud rip.
Someone gasped.
A cold draft touched my ribs, and I stood in the middle of the ballroom I had decorated with my dress open at the side.
Imogen watched with her hand over her mouth.
"All of it," she said. "Every pocket, every fold."
I looked at Jarrett.
He was looking at the floor.
Then a man's voice carried from the back tables, calm and deep.
"Is this what you're looking for?"
Darek Wardell, the Alpha of Ironwood, was crouched beside a table with something small pinched between two fingers.
The diamond caught the chandelier.
He stood and held the ring up for the whole room to see.
"It rolled under here," he said. "I watched it come off her hand during the toast."
The guards let go of me.
Nobody in the ballroom said a word.
Imogen laughed, light and quick.
"Then she dropped it there herself," she said. "Faye knows where everything in this building goes."
"She was nowhere near you," Darek said. "You were on the stage."
"You're a guest, Alpha Wardell. This is not your pack."
"It's not," Darek said. "I'd have said something sooner if I'd known you'd call a woman a thief over it."
Imogen turned her face to Jarrett.
Jarrett cleared his throat and said, "Everyone sit. It's been found. That's all."
That was all.
He did not say sorry, and he did not look at me.
I pulled the torn side of my dress shut with one hand.
With the other, I unpinned the silver Gamma badge from my collar.
I walked to the nearest table and set it down between the wine glasses.
"My resignation was due at the new moon," I said. "I'm not working one more night."
"Faye," Jarrett said. "You'll serve the nine nights. That's pack law."
"Then take me to the Stone and judge me for it," I said.
Nobody moved.
So I walked the length of that ballroom with my hand pressed to my side and three hundred wolves watching me go.
Behind me, I heard a guest say my name like a joke.
I did not turn around.
I had almost reached the doors when Jarrett's voice came into my head through the pack link.
In eight years, he had only ever used the link on me for orders.
"Faye," he said. "Please."
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