Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever novel Chapter 263

Chapter 263: Chapter 263 - You could have just given me a heads up

Voren felt it too, quickly walking around the front of the car and falling into step beside her without a word, and they walked in together.

The same table was open. The one tucked slightly back from the main floor, with the good sightlines and the low light. Neither of them mentioned it. They just walked to it and sat down.

Seraphine picked up the menu and looked at it without reading it.

She felt the change in the room a moment before she identified the cause. The approaching footsteps were too smooth, not a regular server’s gait. She lowered the menu.

The man standing at their table was more polished than a regular waiter, wearing the kind of jacket that didn’t belong on the floor staff. He smiled at both of them with the practiced warmth of someone very accustomed to managing impressions.

"Good evening." His eyes moved between them with open appreciation. "How can I help you tonight, Alpha Voren and Luna Seraphine?"

"Just Sera is fine," Seraphine said automatically.

Voren ordered the same things as last time, easy and unbothered, and the manager made a note of it and then stayed exactly where he was, pen hovering, his attention drifting back to Seraphine with a little too much ease. "And for you, Luna? Anything additional I can—"

"She’ll have what I ordered," Voren said, his voice flat.

"Of course." The manager’s smile didn’t waver. He turned back to Seraphine with something warm and practiced in his expression. "If there’s anything else you need, please don’t hesitate. My name is—"

The sound that came next was quiet. Almost polite.

The customers nearest to them heard it first, that specific stillness that falls over a room when something old and instinctive in the human brain registers danger before the brain had finished processing what the eyes are seeing.

Chairs scraped. People found reasons to be somewhere else. The far end of the restaurant emptied with the kind of efficient, unhurried speed of people who knew exactly what an Alpha wolf’s energy felt like when it crossed a line and had zero interest in being nearby when it finished crossing.

Voren’s claws had come out.

They were in the manager’s stomach before Seraphine fully registered the movement. Not yet deep, but enough to make the point.

Enough to make the man understand in a very direct and physical way that the conversation he’d been planning to have was not a conversation he was going to have.

His face had gone the color of old paper.

Voren’s expression hadn’t changed at all. That was the part that made it worse. He looked exactly the same as he had thirty seconds ago, calm, unhurried, slightly bored, except for his eyes, which had gone that deep absolute black again, and his hand, which was currently inside another man’s torso.

He was about to pull out the manager’s intestines and end him there and then but-

"Voren."

Seraphine’s voice snapped through the room like a crack of electricity, sharp and clear and carrying every ounce of authority she had, which, it turned out, was considerable.

Voren’s hand went still.

One second. Two. And then slowly, with the kind of control that made it clear it was a choice and not a reflex, he pulled back.

His claws retracted, finger by finger, until his hand was just a hand again, human and unhurried, like nothing had happened. He stepped back from the manager and straightened his jacket.