Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

As the Omega led Margaux to the door, I heard my own words echo in my mind.

You happen to be the biggest hypocrite of all.

I had said that to her face in the infirmary, convinced I was passing judgment, not just projecting my own feelings. I meant every word and felt justified at the time. Now, I sat at the dining table, watching my adoptive father send my wife to a kitchen she had never worked in to cook a dish she did not know how to make, and I did nothing.

You got to stay privileged and make your choice without even lifting a finger. I got my world burned right in front of me.

She had been young. She had been afraid, manipulated, and had made a choice that had devastated both of us, and I had spent years sharpening that fact into a weapon. But I had also held her hand out at arm’s length since the moment she arrived here and called it self-preservation while she kept reaching for me anyway.

I really mean it when I say I want to hold your hand. So I hope you still meet me halfway. Even if you will not, I will keep trying to reach you.

She said that in the dungeon, even after a brutal attack had put her in the infirmary for the second time that day. She looked right at me, asking for nothing except the chance to be met halfway.

I pushed my chair back and stood.

"If my wife is to be punished," I said, "then I will be punished with her."

Margaux stopped walking.

She turned around slowly.

Dorian looked at me with an expression I knew well, the specific combination of displeasure and disbelief reserved for moments when I deviated from the script he had written for me in his head.

"Theodore." His voice carried a warning he considered sufficient.

"Pack law recognizes the family unit as one body," I said. "If her Beta’s conduct reflects on her, then her consequence reflects on me. I will not sit here while my wife works alone for something that happened at my table."

"You will sit where I tell you to sit." Dorian’s hands pressed flat against the tablecloth. "I am still the Alpha of this pack. You would do well to remember that before you decide to perform nobility in my dining room."

"I remember it every day." I held his gaze. "I also remember that Valcourt law does not punish one half of a bonded pair while the other watches. If you want to hold her to this, you hold me to it too."

"This is not up for debate—"

"Then stop debating it." I moved away from the table.

I heard his chair scrape back. The sound was followed immediately by a shorter, more alarming sound, the catch of someone whose body had announced its limits without asking permission first. I turned.

Alpha Dorian had gripped the table’s edge. His knuckles had gone white, and his face had shifted from fury into something that looked considerably more fragile beneath it.

I was beside him before he could lose his footing.

"I apologize." I kept my voice low, meant only for him. My hand found his shoulder, steadying without drawing attention to why. "I did not mean to cause you strain. That was not my intention."

He looked at me. The anger was still there, but now mixed with something more complicated—the look of someone who had been strong for so long that needing help felt like an insult.

"You are exactly like him," he said quietly. "Stubborn to the bone."

I did not know whether he meant his son or his own father, and I did not ask.

"The law holds," I said simply. "You taught me that yourself. A man who applies rules selectively does not have rules. He has preferences." I held his gaze. "You do not have preferences. You have standards. I would hope your stance stays that way."

He breathed out slowly. The grip on the table loosened.

"Go then," he said. Not warmly. But he said it.

I straightened and crossed to where Margaux still stood near the door, watching the exchange with an expression I could not fully read.

"Let us go," I said.

"Should you be doing this?" she asked, low enough that it was meant only for me.

"I am meeting you halfway." I kept walking, and she fell into step beside me. "Like you wanted."

She was quiet for a moment. "Is that smart?"

"I also wanted to demonstrate something." I pushed the door open and held it. "That hard decisions are not actually as hard as we make them."

Behind us, Dorian’s voice followed through the dining room.

"Theodore! Come back here. Theodore!"

I let the door close.

The kitchen was large and well-equipped, with four Omegas working at their stations. When we walked in, they all looked up at once. I recognized the careful look of people who had overheard an argument and were pretending not to notice.

"Give us the room," I said.

They were gone in thirty seconds.

Margaux stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking around like someone given a map of a place they had never seen and told to find their way from memory.

"Do you actually know how to cook?" I asked.

She turned to look at me. "It was not considered a Luna’s skill. That was made clear to me essentially from birth."

"Helpful upbringing."

She noticed my sarcasm but held back from any sharp response.

"I thought so." She looked at the countertop. Then at the stove. Then back at me. "How do you intend to help me save Chris, exactly? We are technically in the same boat."

I walked to the giant refrigerator and opened it. The cold air felt good after the dining room. I checked what we had: beef tenderloin, pâté, prosciutto, and the special mushrooms the dish needed.

"Can you even cook?" she asked shortly after, when I did not give her a response. "That is a genuine question. I am not being rhetorical."

"I spent years as a glorified slave." I kept my eyes on the refrigerator. "Learning to cook was not optional. It was that or go hungry, and I made a practical decision."

She went quiet at that. I heard her move to the counter behind me.

"As much as I have no desire to do anything that benefits this Chris specifically," I said, pulling out what I needed, " considering his family now occupies the position mine once held and the chance that there is a reasonable probability that his family had some hand in what happened to mine." I set the items down and turned to look at her. "You look like you have questions. Ask them."

"Then why are you here?" Her voice was careful. "Why are you helping me?"

I looked at her.

"Because I want to," I said.

It was the simplest true thing I had said out loud in longer than I wanted to count, and it sat in the kitchen between us without apology or qualification.

I handed her a knife and a cutting board and pointed to the mushrooms.

"Chop those. Finely."

She accepted both with the confidence of someone who did not want to admit they were uncertain. I turned back to preparing the tenderloin and listened to her begin.

After approximately forty seconds, I looked over.

She held the knife like someone who only knew, in theory, that knives were for cutting. She attacked the mushroom with more hope than skill, and the pieces she cut were all different sizes, as if each one was a new challenge.

She looked up and caught me looking.

"I am doing it," she said.

"You are doing something," I said.

She looked down at the cutting board and adjusted her grip, determined not to let the vegetable win. I felt something in my chest I did not expect and could not name.

I looked back at the tenderloin.

The feeling did not go away.

Not until I acknowledged exactly what it was.