Chapter 125: Question
MARGAUX
He pushed himself up off the floor, found the towel that had landed a foot away, and wrapped it back around his hips with the unbothered ease of someone who had not just greeted the sunrise completely bare.
I kept my eyes on the ceiling for an extra beat before risking a glance, just to confirm the towel had actually returned to its post.
It had.
"How did I end up on the bed last night?" he asked, crossing to the dresser. "I distinctly remember falling asleep on the floor."
"How should I know?"
"You were the only other person in the room."
"I was asleep."
"Convenient timing."
I sat up properly and folded my arms. "Maybe you sleepwalk."
"I do not sleepwalk."
"Then I genuinely have no explanation for you."
He paused with his hand on a drawer and looked at me sideways, the corner of his mouth doing something I had started to recognize as the precursor to him being deeply unhelpful. "While I was washing up," he said, "I noticed something interesting."
He held up his palm.
The burn from the oven rack was gone entirely. Gone, as though it had never happened, the skin smooth and unmarked in the morning light.
"It is healed," he said. "Completely. Which is strange, considering Beta wolves do not usually heal that fast on their own." He turned his hand slightly, examining it like it had personally betrayed him. "So thank you, I suppose. For whatever you did."
"I do not know what you are talking about."
"You do not know how I ended up on the bed. You do not know why my hand healed overnight." He opened the drawer and started selecting something to wear, his back half turned to me. "You seem to know remarkably little about your own actions for someone who was apparently unconscious the entire time."
"That tends to be how unconsciousness works."
He laughed under his breath, low and genuine, and the sound did something unfair to my chest.
I looked away as he reached for a shirt, more out of habit than necessity at this point, and he must have caught the motion in his periphery because his voice came again, lighter this time, almost teasing.
"You know you can look if you want." A pause came, a deliberate one, before he said, "We are married."
"What?"
I turned my head back toward him out of pure reflex, which defeated the entire purpose of having looked away in the first place.
"I am not that freaked out," I said, lifting my chin slightly, as if conviction alone could undo the heat still sitting in my face.
"No?" He set the shirt down without putting it on, which felt like an unnecessary escalation. "You should know you are not shielding right now."
I blinked. "What is that supposed to imply?"
"I can feel exactly what you are feeling." His voice dropped slightly, low and warm, entirely too pleased with himself. "Through the bond. Right now. Very clearly."
My stomach plummeted to somewhere deeply undignified.
"I have no idea what you are talking about," I said. "I am just very rattled about the fall."
"Try a better lie or just stick with the truth, Margotine." He reached for the towel knot at his hip. "If you would like to stop feeling embarrassed about it, the easiest solution is to actually look instead of pretending not to want to."
"Étienne—"
I did not even get to finish before he pulled the towel off.
I whipped my head away so fast my neck protested, heat exploding across my face with a force that had nothing left to do with subtlety, and I heard him laugh properly this time, a full, unguarded sound that filled the room in a way I had not heard from him before.
"You are insufferable," I said to the wall.
"I am informative."
"You are something."
I focused on the sounds of him finally getting dressed—fabric shifting, a drawer closing—and kept my gaze glued to the wall with the determination of someone refusing to repeat the same mistake twice in one morning.
"Did you go through the file?" I asked, mostly to redirect myself onto safer ground.
"No." His voice had shifted back into something more measured. "I was tired last night. I will probably start today."
"Probably?"
"Today," he picked that word out from his sentence and stuck with it as if he did not want me to push any harder. Then, after a beat, quieter: "What about her?"
I did not need to ask who he meant. I knew exactly what he was getting at.
"Did you talk to your mother yet," he clarified anyway, "about whatever is happening with your sight?"
"I was going to. After I used the bathroom." I gestured vaguely at the door we had both just nearly died in front of. "Which has not exactly gone as planned this morning."
"Get to it," he said. Not unkindly. Just direct, the way he was about most things that mattered to him.
I turned around.
Now fully dressed in dark trousers and a plain shirt, his hair still damp and swept back, he looked for a fleeting moment less like a ruthless Alpha who held an estate together by sheer will and more like the boy I remembered from the forget-me-not fields—only taller, sharper, shaped by everything that had come between then and now.
I wondered if he was going to ask me the question I had not been able to answer the night before.
Whether I could let him take my mother’s life if it came to that. Whether love and complicity could share space in the same heart without one eventually erasing the other. I had offered him silence instead of an answer, and silence had been enough for him last night, but morning always seemed to pry open what the night had let settle.
I opened my mouth, half expecting to bring it up myself rather than wait for him to ask.
But the words would not come.
He walked past me to a different drawer.
He pulled it open, revealing rows of masks arranged with the same careful precision as everything else in this room. Black ones. Pale ones. One with subtle gold detailing along the edge that I had never seen him wear. He reached past several of them and lifted out a plain white one, turning it over once in his hands.
A knock hit the door, hard and urgent.
We both turned toward it at the same moment.
"Open," Étienne said.
Laurent came through the door already moving, his chest rising and falling fast enough that he had clearly run a significant distance to reach us. Whatever composure he usually carried into every room had been stripped away entirely, and the expression on his face sent a current of unease straight through me before he said a single word.
"What?" Étienne said. Just the one word, flat and immediate.
"Séverine was attacked." Laurent’s voice came out rough, still catching up to his own breathing. "Badly. She is in the infirmary now."
I turned to look at Étienne.
The mask slipped from his hand and hit the floor, neither of us making a move for it, and he was already moving—past me, through the door—before I could even process Laurent’s words. His composure vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by something raw and urgent that the bond hurled straight into my chest before I could brace myself.