Chapter 45: Divine Pairing
MARGAUX
"Of course." I turned back to the window. "Wouldn’t want your revenge interrupted by something as inconvenient as my death."
"Exactly."
I heard him move closer. His footsteps were quiet against the carpet, but I felt his approach through the bond more than heard it.
"There are rules while you’re here." He stopped a few feet behind me. Close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him. "You don’t go anywhere alone. You don’t speak to anyone without my permission. You definitely don’t try to contact your family or that Beta bastard who thinks he’s your knight."
Without a word, he reached into his pocket and held something out to me.
My phone.
I stared at it for a second before taking it from his hand. The screen was cracked near the corner. Probably from last night.
"You had it?" I frowned.
"I had someone bring it to me. I need to check some stuff."
That part did make some alarm bells ring in my head because what the hell did he mean by ’some stuff"?
I did not waste time. I clicked the on button, and the screen lit up under my thumb. I had a few missed calls. From Shanelle. My mother. And even Chris.
My chest tightened painfully at the sight of them. But I did not let it show, and I looked up to face him. "Check some stuff? How did you even know my password?"
Then his next words made my stomach twist.
"It was easy. You are quite easy to read."
I looked up slowly.
His expression did not change beneath the stag mask.
"What I wanted to know is you revealed what you have now found out about me last night to anyone," he continued calmly. "To my surprise, though, you haven’t called or messaged anyone about me. Not even your mother. It makes me wonder if some part of you has started to see a little bit of reason."
"What would that be?"
"That your family is a den of vile snakes."
The simple answer irritated me.
"You really are insane. But to be frank, I had wanted to call my mother and even my uncle Lucian. But I wondered what if you were right. A grace you have yet to give me. I see now that I was wrong."
He laughed at that. "I did give you a chance, Margotine. At the infirmary, and you showed me yet again whose hands you would hold tightly."
"I stand by my choice," I said through a glare. But the truth was, some part of me was faltering now. I did not know where to stand, and I hated it. I also could not bring myself to accept many of the things Étienne was saying as fact. He was a completely different person now. Who knew if he was actually being honest... But the thing was... he could not be lying about a few things, no matter what, and I... I... I did not know what to do with that.
"Well..." His response cut through my train of thought. "You can continue to stand by that thinking of yours. I really do not care. But do be hush about my identity if you can. I do not want it to be a problem for the Beaumonts right now."
I scoffed softly. "Your identity."
"Yeah, is there a problem?"
"What if I refuse?"
"Then people die." His voice stayed eerily calm. "That should be increasingly clear to you now."
Like every time that he had said it, he meant it. Every word carried absolute certainty. I turned away.
"You’re a monster."
"Yes." He said it simply. Like acknowledging a fact about the weather. "I am. Your family made me one."
"Fuck... We were children." I turned to face him again. "We were both children who got caught up in something we didn’t understand and couldn’t control. When will you—"
"Don’t." The command came out sharp enough to make me flinch. "Don’t keep trying to make this about shared trauma or circumstances beyond our control. You never and you will never understand what I went through."
He stepped back toward the door.
"That is not what I am saying... I am saying and begging for you to understand that I did not want any of what you faced to happen to you. But I was a child. I did not have power. Fuck!!! My brothers had more say in anything that I ever could. Even now."
"I am sure your drowning situation has not completely stripped you of your senses." He gestured toward the attached room where I’d nearly drowned. "Because... if you thought about it for two seconds... You would realize even more why you were pushed to reject me then. The goal was to completely annihilate the Archambault family. The concept of me being mates with the ruling Alpha’s daughter? It would have saved me. It was old law after all, and that... that could not happen..."
"What old law?"
"C’mon, Margotine.. you do not have to pretend here."
Then it clicked. The law of divine pairing.
But that had not been why Mother had told me to end the bond with him. No... It could not be.
The law was born centuries ago.
Centuries ago, there was an Alpha King who ruled during a period called the Hollow Winter, when infertility and dead heirs nearly destroyed several major bloodlines. His Luna miscarried repeatedly, and for years the kingdom believed their line would end with him.
Then an Omega servant who was being charged for a crime had claimed she was carrying his child and it was true.
The problem was that the omega had poisoned the Luna.
Not enough to kill her, but enough to weaken her womb permanently. When the truth came out, the kingdom demanded the Omega’s execution. Under old pack law, harming a Luna was considered treason against the bloodline itself.
But since the Omega was already pregnant with what might have been the Alpha’s only heir.
He delayed her sentencing for months. Then months became a year.
The child was born healthy and strong. A boy with the Alpha King’s eyes and the kind of presence that made even hardened warriors take notice.
The kingdom waited for justice. For the Omega to face execution now that her purpose had been served.
But the Alpha King shocked everyone with a declaration that changed pack law forever.
He claimed the Omega was his fated mate. That the goddess herself had bound them together through divine pairing, and he’d only discovered the truth after she’d already been imprisoned for her crimes against the Luna.
The court erupted in chaos. Divine bonds were sacred, but they were also supposed to be obvious. Undeniable. Yet no one had sensed anything between the Alpha King and the Omega servant before her arrest. No one had seen signs of the connection he now insisted existed.
But the King stood firm. He swore before the goddess and his entire court that the bond was real. That killing his fated mate—even one guilty of treason—would bring catastrophe upon the kingdom. Bad harvests. Stillborn children. The goddess’s wrath manifesting in ways that would destroy them all.
The kingdom had no choice but to believe him. Or pretend to, at least. Because the alternative was accusing their King of lying about a divine bond, which was its own form of heresy.
So he created a new law. The Law of Divine Pairing. It declared that any wolf confirmed as a fated mate could not be executed, even for capital crimes, because harming a bond chosen by the goddess herself was an offense against the natural order.
The Omega’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Her son was raised in the palace as a legitimate heir, though forever marked by the scandal of his mother’s crimes. And the law remained, carved into pack doctrine across territories.
But historians who studied the period closely knew the truth. There had been no divine bond. The Alpha King had simply fallen in love with a psychotic Omega who’d poisoned his Luna and manipulated her way into his bed. He’d manufactured a religious justification to save her life because he couldn’t bear to watch her die.
The law was born from obsession masquerading as divine will. From a King who’d lied to an entire kingdom and gotten away with it because who would dare call an Alpha a liar about something only he and the goddess could verify?
The Law of Divine Pairing.
I stared at Étienne as the realization crashed over me like ice water.
"The bond." My voice came out barely above a whisper. "We had a bond. Even then. Before the executions."
"Yes." The word carried no emotion.
My legs threatened to give out. I grabbed at the windowsill for support while my mind raced through the implications.
"That’s why she made me reject you." The pieces clicked together with horrible clarity. "My mother. She knew if the bond became public knowledge, if anyone realized we were fated mates, you could claim protection under the Law of Divine Pairing."