Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LUCIAN

He did not want to talk.

I could see it in the way he sat, arms crossed, jaw set, the clear posture of a young man who had decided in advance that he was not going to give me anything and was waiting for me to exhaust myself trying.

"Why would my family have anything to do with those people’s deaths?" he said. "We did not know them until we got blessed to be Beaumont Beta house."

"I am not supposed to say," I said.

I ran a hand through my hair, the gesture I used when I wanted someone to believe I was reluctant rather than deliberate.

"That can only mean you left the file at Valcourt," I said.

He said nothing. It was confirmation enough, but I wanted to hear the fool say it.

"Chris." I kept my voice low. "Did you leave the file at Valcourt?"

"I did it to save her." The words came out sharper than he intended, though he caught himself immediately.

I leaned forward, looking at the door. "Keep your voice down before your mother comes back in here wondering what we are discussing."

I then looked back at him.

I was genuinely irritated, which was useful because the irritation was real and real emotions read more convincingly than performed ones.

"I expected better from the Beta heir," I said, quiet and disappointed, which was considerably more cutting than anger. "Significantly better."

"I am at my wit’s end too," he said.

"What did Valcourt want it for?" I demanded. "What reason did he give you?"

"At the time, their Alpha implied that he needed it to identify a spy in his territory," Chris said. "Someone who had been selling information."

"And you believed that?"

"Of course not. Not entirely." He shook his head. "But Margaux was suffering there, and I had no other cards to play because I was accosted and put in prison. He intended to use me to start another conflict with Beaumont. I had to hit two birds with one stone."

I clenched my fist beneath the table where he could not see it.

Emotional fools. Every single one of them, making catastrophic decisions for the sake of feelings they had not examined closely enough to understand.

"I did figure out the bastard was a liar," Chris said, half to himself now, the words coming faster with the quality of something being worked through rather than delivered. "A fraud. But I did not think—" He stopped. His eyes went somewhere else, some internal calculation I was not privy to. "He hated my guts. Obviously. From the second I arrived. But if he knew what you are now telling me, if he actually—" He stopped again. "Why did he not just harm my sister and me while he had us? Margaux told me all about it when we were younger. Did he not know? Fuck! Did I just hand my family’s ruin into his hands?"

I listened to the broken pieces and said nothing.

The Valcourt Alpha... Chris was talking about the Valcourt Alpha knowing something specific, something personal, something that should have made the Alpha act and had not.

I hated being in the dark but seeing him unravel was interesting and necessary. He would not be capable of hiding everything.

"Perhaps," I said carefully, "we should tell your father. Before this spirals past the point where it can be managed quietly."

Chris’s eyes went wide.

"Absolutely not." His voice dropped to something urgent and low. "My father is not rational about things like this. He will not forgive me this time. You do not know what he is like when he—"

"I am not sure there is a way to contain this on our own," I said.

He grabbed my arm.

"Do not," he said. "You can handle this. You pull more weight in this pack than your title suggests, and you know it. I know it too. You do not need my father. I... I... will help you. Whatever you need. Just keep my father out of it."

"I do not know about that," I said, making him work for it.

"I know why he actually wanted the file," Chris said.

I held very still.

"I was played," he said, the words coming out like something he had been holding and could not hold anymore. "Tricked. He used my feelings for Margaux to get what he needed. And now he has Margaux too. She is like fucking play dough in his fingers. I cannot even blame her." He looked at me with an expression I recognized as a man talking himself through accepting something he hated. "She loves him."

"The... Valcourt Alpha?" I inserted slowly.

Chris nodded.

I kept my face arranged into something neutral while the full absurdity of it processed through me. The man had dressed my niece in red and paraded her before assembled packs as a conquest, had engineered the entire humiliation with surgical precision, and she had responded by falling in love with him? Women were extraordinary in their capacity for self-destruction.

Why was I even surprised? She learned from the very best.

"He is even an A—" Chris started.

And then he stopped.

Not because he had decided to stop. Because something had stopped him.

I watched his throat work against nothing, his face going red, his eyes widening with the alarm of someone whose body had suddenly stopped cooperating with their intentions.

"Are you alright?" I asked, taking a step forward.

He kept trying. His mouth moved around the beginning of a word, something starting with A, and the visible effort of it was extraordinary, his neck straining, the veins standing out at his temples.

Then I saw the dents.

Pressure marks, appearing and disappearing in rapid succession against the skin of his throat, as though invisible fingers were closing around it. His eyes were beginning to burst blood vessels at the corners from the strain.

I took a step back.

"What the fuck," The words tore out of me, and for once it was completely genuine.

It did not even take a second after that before Chris dropped to the floor.

At the same time, a knock hit the door.

"I heard some noise," Martha’s voice came through. "Is everything alright?"

I moved fast, crossing to Chris, getting him upright, arranging him in the chair with the practiced efficiency of someone who had moved unconscious bodies countless of time and knew very well the logistics of it. I smoothed his hair. I even straightened his collar.

I cleared my throat and only then did I open the door. I was probably seconds away before she decided to forget respectability politics and open the damn door herself.

"I choked on the last of my tea," I said, smiling at her while pretending to still be affected by the fictional tea choking. "Entirely my fault." I added for good measure.

But she seemed to have clocked out of that conversation. I watched her eyes travel past me into the room and find her son in the chair and I kept my expression pleasant and faintly embarrassed. "Chris and I had a long conversation. He dozed off toward the end."

She looked back at me and then back at her son. I half wondered if she had something to say about it. Maybe she would even walk up to the boy and force his eyes open to see the burst vessels and scream for help.

But she didn’t.

"Right," she said instead.

I took that as a cue not to push my luck. I had no idea what happened to the bastard. The whole ordeal was freakish and strange.