Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

"I do not understand most of what Laurent tried to explain to me even though I have now seen some of this strangeness myself," he admitted, his voice gruff. "Ghosts and spirits and all of this sight business is starting to make my head ache considerably." He paused, steadying himself. "But I am glad you are back." He rested a hand briefly on my shoulder, the gesture awkward but sincere, and then he added, "Rest. Get well. Then we will talk, you and I."

He then turned and walked out without waiting for a response, which was entirely consistent with how Dorian conducted most conversations he found emotionally inconvenient.

Laurent stepped forward.

He put his hand on Margaux’s shoulder briefly, the gesture of someone offering something without making a production of it, and looked at her with an expression that communicated more than it said. Then he looked at me.

"Welcome back," he said simply. "You scared us for a bit there."

Then, along with Margaux, he followed Dorian out.

Once the others had left, the head healer drew closer, his eyes narrowing as he examined the wound along my side. There was an ease in the way he moved, a confidence shaped by countless hours spent tending hurts far stranger than mine, and I could sense that very little in this world startled him anymore. With practiced hands, he probed the edges of the injury, his touch gentle but unflinching, as though he was searching for some hidden truth beneath the surface. I watched his face for a flicker of doubt or worry, but found only calm curiosity—a craftsman’s interest in the body’s mysteries, rather than any real fear for the outcome.

"Remarkable," he said after a moment.

"What?"

"Your healing factor." He looked up at me. "It is almost back to baseline. Whatever changed in the last few minutes, it changed considerably." He studied my face with the straightforward curiosity of a man who had seen enough to suspect the explanation was not strictly medical. "Do you have the will to live now?"

I looked at the doorway through which Margaux had just passed.

The smile arrived before I had decided to produce it.

"What sort of question is that?" I said.

He made a sound that might have been satisfaction and might have been relief and was probably both.

"Good." He reached for the cabinet behind him. "Because what I am going to give you now will knock you out completely, and it will work considerably better if your body is cooperating with it rather than working against it."

He set two bottles on the surface beside the cot. One was green, the deep vivid green of something pulled from the bottom of the sea. The other was black, the specific black of something that had been reduced to its most essential and least appealing form.

"Both of them," he said.

I looked at the bottles.

"At once?"

"One after the other is fine," he said, with the patience of someone who had learned to anticipate objections. "But both. And quickly."

I picked up the green bottle first, eyeing its strange, sea-glass hue as I tipped it back and took two long, determined gulps. The taste was sharp and wild, flooding my mouth with something bitter and medicinal, the kind of flavor that did not care if you liked it, only that you obeyed. My throat burned, but I forced it down, stubborn as ever. The black bottle followed, its contents sliding over my tongue with an uncanny absence of taste, like drinking shadow or memory, nothing to hold onto and nothing to resist. That emptiness lingered as I handed the bottles back to the healer, and I wondered which was worse—the harshness or the void.

Even before his hands closed around the glass, I felt it begin: a slow, insistent warmth unfurling in my chest, spreading outward in gentle waves, coaxing the tension from my muscles and replacing it with a heavy, drowsy comfort. My limbs grew leaden, not with fear but with a velvet weight that promised rest rather than oblivion. The edges of the room began to slip out of focus, the stark lines of bed, lamp, and healer all softening at the margins as if the world itself were exhaling around me.

I sank back against the pillow, surrendering to the hush that gathered in the corners. My mind drifted, thoughts spiraling toward the question the apparition—probably some twisted incarnation of my own guilt—had pressed on me. Was there a restless ache in the world beyond, my parents caught in the orbit of unfinished revenge, waiting for justice I kept putting off? Did they sense my attention shifting, feel me choosing her again and again, while they hovered somewhere just out of reach, watching and wanting?

For a moment, the weight of that question pressed down on me, solid and unyielding, as if grief itself had hands and knew precisely where to squeeze. I let it settle, let the ache for all the unfinished things bloom in my chest, refusing—for once—to turn away from the hurt. The warmth inside me kept growing, gentle and certain, threading through my bones until the ache dulled and my thoughts loosened their hold. The sorrow did not vanish, but it softened at the edges, losing its teeth as drowsiness crept in.

Sleep came slowly, curling around me like a blanket left out in the sun. This darkness was nothing like the terror I had known in the field, nothing like the voice that had stolen Yann’s face and tried to claw at my mind. There was no pressure, no threat lurking in the black, only the ordinary hush of a body spent and ready to be mended. I felt myself slipping further, limbs heavy and breath deepening, and for the first time in too long, I did not resist.

I let the dark have me, let it untangle the knots in my thoughts and ease the muscles that had been braced for disaster. This time, I surrendered willingly, trusting that on the other side, there would be something softer, something like peace.