Alpha's Regret The Luna He Left Behind novel Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Third–Person POV

The story didn’t die with Genevieve.

It spread.

For two weeks straight, Serena Sterling’s name trended across every major online forum, every news feed, every

comment section.

Not the way she’d always wanted it to.

The other way.

The police took her into custody before the chapel had even emptied out.

The buyers came next.

Every collector who had paid serious money for her paintings hired a lawyer.

The lawsuits stacked up fast, one after another, each one landing on the Silvercrest Pack like bricks dropped from a roof.

The debt piled so high so fast that Russell’s hands shook when he tried to add it up.

He couldn’t finish the math.

His body finished it for him.

The rage built until something gave way inside his skull, and he went down hard.

Stroke.

Just like that.

Over at Blackthorne, the damage came from a different direction.

Hartwell Group’s stock didn’t just dip.

It cratered.

Blackthorne Pack’s council moved before the scandal could rot any deeper.

Sebastian lost his footing within weeks.

His father looked at him across the boardroom table one afternoon and didn’t say a word.

He didn’t have to.

Sebastian walked out with nothing.

He lost the title.

He lost the money.

He lost the Alpha succession he’d traded Genevieve for.

And then he lost himself.

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< Chapter 6

It didn’t happen all at once.

k crept in.

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He’d close his eyes for ten minutes and the accident would be right there waiting for him.

Every time.

Genevieve, pinned under the wreckage.

Her fingers wrapped around the cuff of his pants.

Her voice coming out small and broken and desperate.

Sebastian… save me. Please. It hurts. It hurts so much.

And his own hands.

Working methodically.

Peeling her fingers back.

One by one.

Setting them aside.

Then turning toward Serena.

He had done it without hesitating.

That was the part that kept him awake.

Not the choice itself.

The ease of it.

He’d relived that moment so many times the edges had worn smooth, and still it cut him the same.

Sedatives didn’t reach it.

Alpha blood didn’t save him.

Nothing did.

Derek saw him exactly once.

He was crossing a parking lot, head down, when Sebastian stepped out from between two cars.

Derek stopped.

His jaw set.

“Murderer.”

He said it flat.

No heat.

Like a label he was reading off a tag.

Then he walked away.

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< Chapter e

The word followed Sebastian everywhere after that.

Derek’s own life wasn’t much better.

Chem to us by the

He’d come home exhausted every night to find debt collectors blocking the front door.

Sticks in their hands.

Voices loud and ugly, demanding numbers Derek didn’t have.

He’d wait them out in his car until they left, then slip in through the backyard like a thief in his own house.

Russell couldn’t get out of bed anymore.

Diane hadn’t left the house in weeks.

She’d stopped eating properly.

She cried at the kitchen table.

She cried in the hallway.

She cried in the middle of sentences and couldn’t find her way back to the end of them.

Derek would get her sedatives down, then drag Russell to the bathroom, wash him up, get him settled.

By the time he finished, the sky outside would already be going gray.

He’d stand there in the half–dark kitchen and feel the absence like a physical thing.

Genevieve used to do all of this.

She’d moved through these rooms quietly and kept everything running.

She’d cooked.

She’d organized.

She’d held the shape of this family together with her hands while the rest of them looked straight past her.

And then she’d stand in the doorway and watch Serena curl up in their parents‘ arms, and nobody would call her

1. in.

Every time that image surfaced, something in Derek’s chest pulled tight and wrong.

He shoved it down.

Put his shoes back on.

Went out to work.

This went on for more than six months.

His body collected the damage.

Bruises that didn’t fully heal.

Muscles that ached in the morning.

Money that covered the interest on the debt but never touched the principal.

Silvercrest Pack was falling apart.

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<Chapter 6

The old noble name still hung on the gates, but inside the estate there was nothing left of its pride.

On a rare break, Derek opened social media.

Genevieve’s video was still circulating.

Comments numbered in the millions.

People were still watching it.

Still sharing it.

Still coming after the Sterling family in the comment sections with everything they had.

Derek stared at his sister’s face on the screen.

A feeling moved through him that he didn’t want to name.

Why did you have to do it like this?

If you’d just stayed quiet, kept it together, none of this would be-

He shut the app.

He sat with his hands between his knees for a long time.

Then the call came.

A buyer.

Private collector.

Thirty million dollars for Genevieve’s final painting.

Derek said yes before he hung up.

He found Diane already holding it when he came to get it.

Both arms wrapped around the canvas, knuckles white.

“No.” Her voice was raw. “This is the only thing she left. You are not taking it.”

Derek looked at the painting.

A girl on a shore, flying a kite.

The water behind her catching the light.

Something easy and free in the way she stood.

That was the last birthday Genevieve had before Serena came home with them.

Before everything shifted.

His throat tightened.

He reached out and pulled the canvas from his mother’s arms anyway.

“What good does holding it do?” His voice cracked straight down the middle. “She’s gone.”

He had to stop.

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< Chapter 6

Breathe.

But this-” He held the painting up. His hands were shaking. “This gets us out.”

Diane crumpled against the wall.

Derek handed it over.

The thirty million cleared every debt.

The house came back.

The numbers finally balanced.

Nobody felt anything.

The rooms were quieter than they’d ever been.

The kind of quiet that has nothing peaceful in it.

Russell stared at the ceiling from his bed.

Diane moved through the hallways like she’d forgotten what she was looking for.

“Genevieve.”

Diane’s voice one night, just above a whisper, talking to no one.

“I’m sorry. You were so good to us and we

–

we never-”

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She couldn’t finish.

She went to the emergency room that night.

Chest tight.

Breathing wrong.

Body finally saying what her words couldn’t.

Derek sat in the waiting room alone.

His phone buzzed.

The house manager’s number.

He answered.

“Mr. Sterling.” The man’s voice was careful. “Your father passed away this evening.”

Derek held the phone against his ear.

He didn’t cry.

He didn’t move.

He just said, “Okay,” and ended the call.

Both parents.

One day.

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Chapter o

Claim 16. By Char-

He sat in that waiting room chair until the fluorescent lights above him buzzed and flickered.

Then he got up and walked outside into the cold air and stood there until his lungs stopped feeling like they were full of something solid.

Across town, Sebastian wasn’t getting better.

He was getting worse.

The hospital kept him.

Grant Hartwell paid the bills because Sebastian was still his son, technically, even if he’d stopped looking at him

like one.

The doctors tried everything.

Therapy.

Medication.

Video footage of Serena’s sentencing, her face on the courtroom screen, guilty, convicted, sentenced.

Sebastian watched it.

It didn’t help.

He’d grip the orderly’s sleeve in the hallway and ask the same question every time.

“Where is my Luna?”

Eyes wide and searching, voice urgent like he’d just thought of it.

“Why hasn’t she come? Where is Genevieve?”

The doctor explained it to Derek one afternoon in the corridor, voice low and resigned.

“The guilt rewired something. He believes he’s responsible for her death. We can’t get past it.”

Derek leaned against the wall and watched Sebastian through the small window in the door.

Sebastian was pacing.

Muttering.

Hands moving like he was still trying to pull someone free from wreckage.

“What would it take?” the doctor asked. “For him to get better. In your opinion.”

Derek watched for another second.

“He doesn’t need to get better,” he said quietly. “He’s a killer.”

He pushed off the wall and walked down the hall.

His steps weren’t steady.

He didn’t look back.

They say most people find their footing again within a year of a major loss.

Derek was in that two thirds.

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7

It took everything he had.

But he built something.

Three years out, he had a family of his own.

A spouse.

Two kids.

He watched them constantly.

Measured every interaction, every moment of attention, every gift and every consequence.

He was almost obsessive about it, making sure neither one ever felt less than the other.

Neither one ever felt like the one standing outside the doorway.

He knew exactly why.

Sebastian recovered too.

Slowly.

Partially.

Years of the mental weight had settled into his body and made a home there, the way long damage does.

Heart disease.

The doctors said it wasn’t uncommon given the duration and severity of the psychological strain.

He got out of the hospital three years after Genevieve died.

He shaved the morning he went to her grave.

Put on a suit.

Bought flowers, the good kind, the kind that meant something.

He stood in front of her headstone for a long time.

The flowers were in his hands.

The ring was in his pocket.

out

on

name.

He took it out and set it on the stone in front of her name.

The ring he had once chosen for their mating ceremony.

He didn’t say he was sorry.

He already knew he had no right to ask for that.

He just stood there in the morning cold, looking at her name carved in stone, and breathed.

The wildfire had moved through all of them.

It left marks that didn’t fade.

Scars that pulled tight in certain weather.

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Life kept going anyway.

I always does.

But the longing stayed.

The regret stayed:

Those things don’t burn away.

They just wait.

Last Christmas Jenna received a mysterious gift from a secret Santa who never came forward. Fast forward next Christmas and the mysterious person returns. With more lavish gifts and mysterious messages. When Jenna develops a fragile relations…

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