Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever novel Chapter 264

Chapter 264: Chapter 264 – Voren’s ‘surprise’

"Ready?" Voren asked, standing from his chair.

"Bed," she said simply as she rose to her feet. They got into the car, Voren pulled out of the parking lot and turned in the wrong direction.

Seraphine watched the road for a moment, cross-referencing it against the route back in her head. "This isn’t the way."

"No."

"Then where are we going?"

He glanced at her sideways, and the faintest suggestion of something crossed his face. "Surprise."

She looked at him, thought about pushing it, but there was approximately zero times in her experience that pushing Voren on something had produced a result she wanted.

She turned back to the window.

"Fine," she said to the glass.

The drive was long enough and warm enough and the hum of the engine was steady enough that her eyes started going heavy before she’d fully decided to let them.

She told herself she was just resting her eyes, and was asleep within four minutes, coming back to consciousness all at once.

The sound of lots of water moving fast, pulled her up out of sleep before she’d even finished deciding to wake up. She straightened in the seat and blinked, and the world came back in pieces.

Dark sky. Moon overhead. Trees all around, taller than the ones near the packhouse, older-looking. And that sound everywhere, filling the air, rushing and alive and constant.

"We’re here," Voren said.

She looked out the windshield. And then she saw it.

"Oh my—" The words dropped off her tongue half-finished. She was already reaching for the door handle. "Where is this place?"

The waterfall came down from a height she couldn’t fully gauge in the moonlight, white and silver and loud, breaking against the rocks at the base and spreading wide and flat and clear.

The moon sat almost directly above it, throwing light across the whole thing in a way that made the water look like it was lit from the inside. The air around it was cold and clean and tasted like something she couldn’t name, something that reached back into her chest and pulled at something she’d packed away a long time ago.

She was out of the car before Voren had fully stopped talking.

"We should have come while it was still light," he called after her, stepping out himself, "but the rain had other ideas. Moon’ll have to do."

She wasn’t listening. She was already moving toward the water, arms slightly out for balance on the uneven ground, and the smile pulling at her face was the kind she didn’t know she was wearing.

"I’ve loved waterfalls my whole life," she said, half to herself, her voice lifting slightly over the rush of it. "Since I was little. How did you—"

She didn’t finish the question. She was already at the edge of the water, crouching down, letting her fingers drag through the cold current where it spread thin and fast across the flat rocks at the base of the falls.