Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

Chris stood in the doorway, absently rubbing the raw skin around his wrist where the cuff had bitten into it. His expression shifted almost imperceptibly, resolve settling over the remnants of hesitation, as though he had finally chosen a path and was teaching himself how to live with it.

"You should go," I said to Shanelle shortly after. "Call me when you get home."

"We can have Sentinels drive you back," Laurent offered.

Chris’s eyes slid to him, the look he gave him flat enough to cool the room.

"No need for a Valcourt escort," he said. "I left a bike somewhere before all of this. We’ll manage."

Then he looked at me.

He held my gaze a heartbeat longer than necessary, the silence between us carrying every apology, every thank you, every unfinished sentence neither of us had the strength to voice.

A smile found him at last, small enough to tremble at the edges, but real.

"Goodbye," he said.

I nodded.

He turned, and Shanelle fell into step beside him. At the mouth of the corridor she glanced back, lifting a hand in a quiet wave. I returned it, watching until they disappeared around the corner, leaving only the echo of their footsteps and the peculiar emptiness that follows people you know you’ve just seen for the last time in a very long while.

Laurent watched until Chris and Shanelle disappeared around the corner. Only then did he glance back at the room behind him, taking in the mess of furniture and bed.

"I’ll have the Omegas clean up the mess," he said.

"Thank you."

I turned toward him.

He didn’t move.

Something in my face must have made him wait.

"Theodore asked me to tell you hello," I said. "The part of him that lingered with his father. He said he hopes you stay happy."

Laurent went utterly still.

His gaze drifted to the floor, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly before he drew a slow breath. When he looked at me again, his eyes were clear, though softer than I had ever seen them.

"Thank you," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "For everything."

He inclined his head, then turned and disappeared into the service corridor.

I stood there for another moment, listening to his footsteps fade into the distance before returning to the room.

My phone was where I’d left it.

I picked it up, unlocked the screen, and called my mother.

It rang until the call rolled over to voicemail.

I called again.

Voicemail.

After a moment, I opened my messages instead.

I’m fine. What did you want to talk about? Elle said you were worried. Talk soon.

I hit send, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and remained where I was.

The room blurred into the edges of my vision.

Prim’s words circled through my mind, refusing to settle. About what I was. About the parts of myself I had only just begun to recognize. Then my mind drifted to what the head healer had said about his sister, who currently lived an unremarkable life in the human world because no one here had possessed the understanding, or perhaps the courage, to know what she truly was.

Eventually, I made my way back to the infirmary.

The Omega apprentices were gone. In their absence, the room had shed its frantic energy. Fresh linens had replaced bloodstained ones. Instruments had been returned to their trays. The air still carried the sharp scent of antiseptic and herbs, but the panic that had saturated every corner only minutes earlier had finally loosened its grip.

I crossed the room toward Étienne’s cot.

Then I stopped.

My breath caught somewhere behind my ribs.

The scars on his face were... changing.

The change came by fractions. So little from one heartbeat to the next that the eye almost refused to believe it was happening at all. It reminded me of frost retreating from a windowpane beneath the first warmth of morning, or stone yielding to years of running water. So gradual it bordered on invisible, until suddenly it wasn’t.

The raised ridges had begun to sink.

The angry, twisted texture softened beneath his skin. Edges that had once seemed carved into him were blurring, the damaged flesh surrendering, little by little, to healthy skin that had been buried beneath years of injury.

I found myself leaning closer, searching for proof that I wasn’t imagining it.

I wasn’t.

His face was healing.

Not completely.

Not yet.

But it was healing.

The breath I’d been holding escaped me in a slow, disbelieving exhale.

"Remarkable, is it not?" The head healer’s voice came from behind me, quiet with professional satisfaction.

"How?" I said. "He has had those for... I don’t know... years. I thought they were permanent."

"Silver and wolfsbane injuries do heal much slower than standard wounds," he said, moving to stand beside me. "But his case was always an oddity. I could never fully account for the degree of permanence." He paused. "It dawned on me eventually that the persistence of the scarring was psychological in the same way his healing factor suppression was psychological. He had decided, somewhere in himself, that he should carry it. That he deserved to carry it."

I looked at Étienne’s face, at the slow and patient work being undone.

"And now whatever was holding it in place," the head healer continued, "has apparently lifted."

A small smile found its way onto my face without my permission.

I turned to him.

"I came for another reason as well," I said. "Your sister. I know it is an unusual request."

"It is not unusual at all," he said. "Not given what I have seen from you today." He looked at me with the straightforward candor I had come to appreciate about him. "I will contact her before you go. You can tell the Alpha your plans when he wakes up and make arrangements." He paused. "She will be pleased, I think. She has spent a long time not meeting anyone like her."

"Neither have I," I said.

He nodded.