Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

My gaze drifted over the boxes again, lingering until it landed on the thing I had been searching for without even realizing it.

There were names on all of them. Some of the names I recognized, and plenty of others I did not. Names that belonged to people who had touched Étienne’s life in the worst ways a person could be touched, and whose debts he had apparently decided to collect in the most permanent currency available.

I looked for mine.

It was not there.

I traced the labels again, slower this time, certain I had overlooked something. The absence pressed into my chest, not quite relief, but something tangled and harder to name.

"There is no box with my name," I said.

Étienne looked at me for a moment. "No."

"There should be one."

"You were not an adult," he said. "You did not have the standing or the power to make the decisions that were made. You made a choice that hurt me, yes, and I have not pretended otherwise." He held my gaze. "But it was not a choice worthy of that level of consequence. You were a girl who was... I guess...afraid and did what afraid people do."

I looked at the boxes again. At Lucian’s name. At my mother’s name.

"So marrying me," I said carefully. "That was the revenge."

"I never hid that."

"No," I said. "You did not."

I turned the information over in my mind and tried to be honest with myself about what it actually meant. He had said it from the beginning. He had never dressed it up in anything softer or more palatable. And somewhere between that time he saved me in the bathtub, the time he chose to enter the kitchen for my sake to save Chris, the kiss, and his forehead against my shoulder in the corridor, I had started allowing myself to forget the architecture of what this actually was.

He had constructed his entire life to reach this moment, to arrive at the place where these names filled these boxes and this ending could happen. And I had stepped into it in a red dress, only to be startled when everything unfolded exactly as he had promised.

I looked at the box with my mother’s name.

This was the part I could not be rational about.

Lucian was a different calculation. He had sold a teenage child into sexual slavery with a smile on his face and called it business. He had hurt him in the worst of ways. So whatever Étienne intended for him, some part of me, the part that had watched the light in his eyes go dim and would probably never be able to sleep well again, without seeing it, that part did not have the language to object.

My mother was different.

My mother had held me in that dressing room. She had trembled while she put the veil on me. She had told me to run if I wanted to, and then told me she wished she had run herself. She had let the files go when I asked her to. She had said, "I know you would never make a choice that would jeopardize your family," as though she still believed that after everything, and the worst part was that I had felt that belief as real.

She had done terrible things. I knew that now with a clarity I had not had before. The rejected bond. The part she must have played in the execution of a more than likely innocent family. The years of silence and careful omission. She had done all of it, and she was still my mother, and I did not know what to do with both of those truths living in the same body at the same time.

Étienne watched me and said nothing for long enough that I knew he was giving me space to arrive somewhere on my own.

"Do you want to know what I think?" he said finally.

"Not if it ends with a reasonable argument for beheading my mother."

"Do you have a response to what you are looking at?"

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

The honest answer was no. I did not have a response that was both truthful and coherent, and I was too tired and too stripped down to manufacture one.

"It is late," I said. "I am going to sleep."

I walked to the bed, moved to the far edge, pulled the blanket over myself, and faced the wall.

The silence behind me had weight.

"That is answer enough," Étienne said. His voice was quiet. Not angry. Something more tired than angry. "I hope you know that, and I cannot blame you for it."

"Good," I said to the wall. "Then do not."

"But if you try to stop me," he said, and the evenness of his tone made it land harder than volume could have, "I will have to take you back as an enemy. I want you to understand that clearly."

I turned over to look at him.

"Because I do not cosign killing?" I said.

"Put yourself in my shoes."

"I am trying." The words came out with more feeling than I intended. "I am genuinely trying. But I cannot wear those shoes. I have never been able to." I sat up slightly. "And here is the worst part. I get it. I can see it from where you are standing. I have never been through what you have been through, and I know that means I have no right to stand here from my comfortable position and tell you that murder is too far." I pressed my hand flat against the blanket. "Maybe that is my privilege talking. Maybe if I had lived your life I would have those boxes too, and more of them. I would probably hate me even more than you do." I exhaled. "So maybe you are better than me for surviving it and only wanting this much."

I looked at him.

"But I love her," I said. "Even now. Even knowing. I love my mother, and I want there to be some explanation that makes sense of everything she did. Some version of events where she was also a victim of Lucian and the pack and all of it, and she just made choices in impossible situations." I heard how that sounded. "I know how that sounds."

"It sounds like someone who loves their mother," he said. "Just like I do. Just like I have for a long time. So you have to understand by rage and what I need."

"I cannot be honest tonight," I said. "Not more than I am being right now. I am not there yet."

"I understand," he said. He crossed to the desk where the files sat and pulled out the chair. "Go to sleep. I have to go through those."

I turned back to the wall.

I heard him settle into the chair, the soft rustle of paper following. The ordinary sounds of someone working, strangely steadying in a world that felt anything but ordinary.

I pressed my face into the pillow and tried to find sleep before the question I had been avoiding finished forming itself.

Could I let him do it?

If it came to it. If the files said what he believed they said, and the case was made, and the verdict came. Could I stand aside and let him take my mother’s head as the price of justice for his family?

The question was insane. I knew it was insane. And still it was there, sitting at the center of my chest with all the weight of something that was not going to disappear just because I refused to look at it.

The bond hummed faintly between us. Not communicating anything specific. Just present. Like a thread running from my sternum to the man sitting at the desk twelve feet away, quiet and undeniable and there whether either of us wanted it or not.

I thought about the goddess.

I thought about what it meant that she had given us this bond a second time, knowing what existed between us. Knowing what had been done and what was still planned. She had looked at this mess of guilt and grief and revenge and unresolved history and decided that these two specific people should be bound to each other anyway.

I could not decide if that was grace or cruelty.

Maybe it was both.

I wanted to wake up a teenager again. I wanted to open my eyes in my childhood bedroom with the specific light of early morning coming through the curtains I had chosen myself, and I wanted to hear my mother moving around in the corridor outside, and I wanted to know that none of this had happened yet, and there was still time to make different choices.

That all of this was a terrible dream.

But the ache in my chest was relentless. Painfully, almost shamefully real, the kind that ignored whether I was ready, whether it was fair, or if I had already wept enough for one day.

I closed my eyes and begged for sleep to come, and did not open them again.

Because I kept praying for a miracle.