Chapter 4: Karma 1
MARGAUX
The Sentinel dropped me at the gates. I didn’t wait for him to open my door. I shoved it open myself and walked up the curved driveway alone, past perfectly manicured hedges and imported Italian fountains that suddenly looked obscene in their excess.
The house loomed ahead. All twenty-three rooms of limestone and privilege, every window dark except for the kitchen staff quarters in the east wing. My mother would be asleep by now, probably with a sleep mask and noise-canceling headphones because she couldn’t bear the sound of the city at night. My brothers had their own wings. I had mine.
I let myself in through the service entrance because I couldn’t stomach walking through the grand foyer right now. The family portrait that hung above the fireplace was like we were some dynasty to be proud of, instead of what we actually were.
Cowards dressed in designer labels and human clothing.
I took the back stairs two at a time, my heels catching on the runner. One twisted beneath me. I kicked them both off and left them there on the landing for some staff member to find in the morning. My feet hit cold stone. The shock of it grounded me enough to keep moving.
My bedroom door slammed behind me with a satisfying bang that echoed down the hallway. I twisted the lock and pressed my back against the wood, breathing hard like I’d run a marathon instead of just climbed three flights of stairs.
The room looked exactly how I’d left it this morning. With clothes scattered across my vanity chair from trying on twelve different outfits before settling on the dress that was now probably ruined from champagne and tears. Makeup brushes I’d knocked over in my rush. My laptop was still open on the bed where I’d been messaging Shanelle about which shoes to wear.
This morning I’d been worried about shoes.
I crossed to my window and stared out at Beaumont territory spread below. Lights twinkled in the distance, each one representing a life that apparently mattered less than maintaining pack power. The border villages my father had shown me on his tablet were too far to see from here. Hidden in the hills where important people didn’t have to think about them until they needed something.
Until they needed a threat.
My phone buzzed in my clutch. I pulled it out to find seventeen missed calls from Shanelle and a string of increasingly frantic texts demanding to know what the hell had happened at the gala. I typed out a response three times and deleted it three times before giving up and turning the phone completely off.
How was I supposed to explain this?
The absurdity of it crashed over me in waves. Twenty-four hours ago, I’d been planning my summer. Shopping trips to Milan. That music festival in Barcelona that Shanelle had been begging me to attend. Maybe convincing my father to let me take a gap year before university, because the thought of four more years of structured education made me want to claw my eyes out.
Now I was getting married to someone I’d never met because my father was too proud to bend the knee and too weak to fight.
I yanked open my closet and started pulling clothes off hangers. Dresses I’d worn to galas, charity events, and birthday parties where everyone pretended to like each other. I threw them on the floor in a growing heap of silk, lace, and expensive fabric that suddenly felt like a costume I’d been wearing my whole life.
A bridesmaid dress from Nathalie Mercier’s wedding last spring landed on top of the pile. I stared at it, remembering how insufferable she’d been about the whole thing. Micromanaging every detail. Demanding that we all wear our hair the same way. Acting like her marriage to some banking heir was the event of the century.
At least she’d chosen her own prison.
My hands were shaking again. I pressed them flat against my vanity, leaning forward until my forehead touched the mirror. The glass felt cool against my skin. My reflection stared back at me. My mascara streaked down my cheeks, my lipstick was completely gone, and I now had hair falling out of the careful updo I’d spent an hour perfecting.
I looked destroyed.
Then those cruel memories hit me without warning like they always did.
Seven years ago. Rain was hammering against cobblestones in the old quarter, where pack justice was still carried out in public view. I’d been sixteen and hidden behind a wall of Sentinels my father had assigned to keep me safe because, apparently, watching people die still required security measures.
The Archambault family knelt in the square. All of them. Mother. Father. The eldest son, whose name I couldn’t remember anymore. Treason, my father had explained in the car on the way there. They’d conspired with some other pack to undermine Beaumont interests, sold pack secrets, and in doing so threatened our security.
It had hurt Father that it was his own Beta at the time that did this.
So they deserved this.
I remembered thinking the rain was fitting. It was dramatic. Like something out of the tragic operas my mother loved watching. The kind of weather that made everything feel more significant than it actually was.
Then they started the executions.
Nothing about it had been quick or remotely merciful. They made it last because pack law demanded witnesses understand the cost of betrayal. I’d tried to look away but my father’s hand had closed on my shoulder, holding me in place.
You need to see this, he’d said. You need to understand what happens when loyalty fails.
The screams carried over the sound of rain.
Smoke rose from burning flesh because they didn’t just kill them. They erased them by burning the bodies so thoroughly that nothing remained except ash and the memory of what happened.
The scent had been worse than the sounds. It had been sweet and so thick I could taste it at the back of my throat for days afterward.
But I remembered Étienne most clearly.