Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 558: Chapter 558 - You waste another second, you lose an eye

Chuck’s breathing caught hard in his throat like someone had punched the air right out of him. ”What the hell are you talking about?”

The words came out broken and almost disbelieving, barely more than a rasp. He stared at Noelle, waiting for the laugh, waiting for the ’just kidding,’ waiting for any sign that this was another cruel game, but it never came.

His chest tightened so painfully it felt like his ribs might crack. The woman he had loved for years. The woman whose hand he had held through every hard season.

The woman whose soft words he had believed without question. She was standing there admitting that the love he felt for her had been manufactured, forced into him by magic like he was nothing more than a puppet.

His stomach turned over hard. Memories slammed through him one after another, every smile she had given him, every kiss, every quiet night he had believed something real lived between them.

Now every single one of those moments felt poisoned. Had any of it ever belonged to him? Or had he just been walking around inside someone else’s spell the whole time?

Chuck’s eyes burned as tears gathered and refused to fall at first. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to demand why she had done this to him, why she had stolen even the chance to choose. But his throat locked up so tight he couldn’t force a single word past it.

The betrayal sat in his chest like a living thing, clawing and heavy, mixed with a heartbreak so sharp it almost drowned out the physical pain of his missing arm.

Seeing the pure darkness still sitting in Bloodfang’s eyes, Noelle went mute. She couldn’t look at Chuck anymore.

The hurt pouring out of his face was worse than the agony still pulsing from her stump.

She had always known the truth might come out someday, but she had never imagined having to face Chuck while the words left her own mouth. Shame crashed over her so hard she looked away, eyes fixed on the bloody snow instead of the man whose life she had quietly ruined.

Bloodfang gave her no time to gather whatever scraps of herself still remained. ”Take her leg.”

Noelle’s head snapped up so fast her neck cracked. Her eyes flew wide with pure, animal terror. ”No—”

She opened her mouth to beg, but a shrill, tearing scream ripped out of her throat as the sword came down. Blood exploded across the snow in a bright, horrible spray. Her leg fell beside her with a dull, final sound.

Noelle collapsed. Her remaining hand clawed desperately at the snow, fingers digging deep as her body convulsed hard. The pain was monstrous, white-hot and endless, ripping through every nerve until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except need it to stop.

She screamed again and again, her voice went raw and cracked while tears poured down her face in sheets. The freezing snow pressed against her skin but she barely felt it.

The agony of losing an arm and a leg swallowed everything else whole. She stared at the severed limb lying several feet away in the blood-soaked white and could not accept that it had been attached to her body only moments earlier.

Her stomach twisted so hard she almost vomited. ”No... no...”

Her voice broke into pieces, as she pressed her remaining hand against the open wound, but there was nothing she could do to stop the horror of what had just been taken from her.

Blood dripped from the sword still held in the outlander leader’s hand and froze in thin red lines against the cold metal.

”I’ll talk! I’ll confess everything,” Noelle cried, the words tumbling out between sobs. She was breaking completely now. The pride she had carried like armor for years lay shattered in the snow around her. There was no powerful woman left standing. Only someone terrified of what Bloodfang would decide to take next and desperate enough to say anything to keep the rest of her body intact.

Bloodfang’s patience had already burned down to nothing. ”You waste another second, you lose an eye.”

Noelle’s entire body went rigid. Her eyes widened until the white showed all around the iris. The threat sent a fresh wave of pure terror crashing through her. She knew without a single doubt that he would do exactly what he promised.

”I wanted Alpha Humphrey first, but just like you, his heart was already locked on Kylie, so the spell didn’t work on him.”

The words poured out of her in a rushed, shaking stream. ”Next best thing after Alpha was Beta, so I used the spell on Chuck.”

Chuck’s face crumpled. He lowered his head as tears finally slipped free and ran down his cheeks in hot tracks that the cold tried to freeze. Regret flooded him so deep it felt like drowning.

He regretted every time he had listened to Noelle. He regretted trusting her soft voice and her careful plans. Now he had lost an arm in the snow because of a woman who had quietly manipulated the very heart inside his chest.

His gaze slowly lifted toward her again. The pain in his eyes was no longer only physical. It was pure betrayal, a humiliation so deep it hollowed him out. It was the unbearable realization that the love he had treasured for years might never have been his choice at all.

His life could have been quiet, even peaceful. He could have grown old without ever knowing what it felt like to have part of his body hacked away while he screamed into the snow. Tears kept brimming and falling as he stared at the woman who had done this to him.

Noelle saw the look on his face and broke down completely. She wanted to explain. She wanted to tell him she had done it because she loved him too, that the spell had only been a way to keep him.

But even she knew how pathetic and empty that excuse sounded now, with blood and body parts scattered around them in the snow.

Bloodfang cared nothing about their heartbreak or their tears. ”Where’s the witch?”

Noelle’s head snapped toward him so fast it hurt. Fear immediately swallowed whatever guilt had been eating her alive. She could not lose another piece of herself. Not an eye, not anything else. She answered this time without a single wasted second.

”She shows up when she feels like it, but the last time she did, we got into an argument because she talked about putting a spell on you to make you fall for her daughter.”

Voren was already certain that particular spell had failed, but Noelle’s next words made his thoughts race in ways he never expected.

”I heard about your daughter’s mom, and all I gotta say is, two people don’t look exactly the same unless it’s DNA or witchcraft.”

Noelle watched his face with naked desperation, hanging on every tiny change of expression.

There were rare cases where people looked alike without sharing blood, but most times identical faces had been proven to share DNA one way or another.

Now Voren kept turning over the memory of how Stanley had found Coco when Voren asked for someone who looked like Seraphine. He had never expected to find a woman who matched her so perfectly.

And because his heart had already been shattered into pieces at the time, he had never questioned it the way he should have. He had been too broken, too empty, too desperate to fill the hole Seraphine left behind. He regretted that blindness later, but it was far too late to undo.

At this moment Voren wanted control back. He wanted to take the reins and question Noelle himself, dig deeper, force every last detail into the open. But Bloodfang knew Voren would waste precious time circling emotions and second-guessing, and the wolf had zero interest in letting soft human feelings slow them down.

So he asked the question that now demanded an answer, voice flat and cold as the snow around them.

”You saying the human girl is the witch’s daughter?”