Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

"Should we let her in?" Dorian asked.

I thought about it for exactly as long as it deserved.

"She is vile in several of ways," I said. "But she is also Margaux’s family. She should be let in."

Dorian looked at the sentinel still standing at the door. "Let our family-in-law in. We will attend to her shortly."

The sentinel nodded and left running.

Dorian turned back to me, his expression unreadable for a moment before doubt slipped through. It was the look of a man who had entrusted someone else with the next move and was only now beginning to wonder whether he’d chosen wisely.

"Should I attend to her?" he said. "Or not?"

"No," I said. "She is my mother-in-law. I will handle it."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes."

He reached into his desk drawer and produced a mask. Red, elaborate, the dragon-style I had kept in my room since making my mark here, its lines dramatic in a way that announced rather than concealed.

He held it out.

"To protect your identity," he said.

I looked at it for a moment.

Then I smiled, and I left the mask where it was.

"The physical scar is gone," I said. "But I have been hiding for long enough. I am not interested in covering the face I have now with something that belongs to who I was pretending to be."

Dorian studied me. "You think that is wise? If she recognizes you—"

"All I ever was," I said, "was a rogue with nothing to his name. Becoming the adopted Alpha of a pack is not unprecedented for someone who started with nothing." I stood. "I have spent years wondering whether the axe will remember what it did to the tree. I am curious and I want to see if she recognizes this face."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Good luck," he said.

He dropped the mask on his desk as I walked out.

I heard her before I reached the lounge.

"Where is my daughter? I heard what she was put through in this hellhole and I will not stand for it. Beaumont is not a pushover. Bring her out now!"

She was up against the sentinels blocking the exit to the lounge and was in the process of attempting to push past them through the combined force of volume and personal authority, neither of which was producing the desired result but neither of which was deterring her either. She carried herself the way women carried themselves when they had decided that the situation required them to be larger than they naturally were, and she was filling every inch of the corridor with it.

I stepped into the space.

She turned at the movement, already loading the next sentence, but that momentarily seized when she looked at me.

"Who are you?" The question came out sharp and dismissive simultaneously. "Where is my daughter? Where is that forsaken disfigured husband of hers?"

I scoffed.

She had no idea.

Of course she did not. She had last seen me at fifteen, which was a long time ago, and fifteen-year-old boys did not generally look like the men they became. Now that the scarring that had defined my face for the last several years was gone, she was looking for a stranger. She was not looking for anyone she had ever known.

I stepped forward.

"It is me," I said. "That forsaken husband."

Her gaze swept over my face with the careful skepticism of someone being told a truth that refused to match the evidence before her. She searched for the scars she remembered, but there were none. Their absence only deepened her uncertainty, leaving her with nothing familiar to anchor recognition.

"Is this some sort of game for you barbarians?"

It as clear she still is not buy it. But it as at that moment that the sentinels bowed.

Her eyes tracked the movement, came back to my face and something in her expression shifted. A recalibration happening in real time, the certainty that she had been looking at a stranger was beginning to crack along its edges.

"I do not understand," she said. "You were scarred. Everyone who told me about you described—"

"I was," I assured her. "But not anymore." I held her gaze without any particular effort. "If you came here for Margotine, I am sorry to tell you that you just missed her. She left for somewhere this morning."

"I do not—" She as trying to say when the words hacked right there.

Something had landed in her face. Not understanding yet, but the precursor to it, the moment before the shape of something becomes clear enough to name. Her eyes were moving over me differently now, not searching for the scarring she had been told to expect but looking at the face underneath it, the actual geometry of it, and I watched the moment it hit her.

The color left her face so fast it was almost interesting to observe.

"What did you just call my daughter?" she said.

I had not answered before her eyes went the rest of the way wide.

She stumbled backward.

The stumble became a fall, and the fall became something more deliberate, and she was on the floor and she kept moving anyway, putting distance between herself and me on her hands while her mouth worked around words that were not quite arriving in the right order.

"Goddess... Stay away from me," she said. "What the—how are you—how are you even—"

I stayed where I was, watching her, and found myself quietly amused. There was a peculiar satisfaction in seeing a moment you had rehearsed a thousand different ways finally arrive, only to discover reality had ignored every version you had written for it. I had always wondered whether the axe remembered what it had done to the tree.

Evidently it did.

"I am sorry," I said, keeping my voice entirely worried. "What is happening? You look like you have seen a ghost."

She stopped moving.

She looked up at me from the lounge floor, her expression too crowded with emotion to be neatly untangled. Fear. Recognition. And beneath them both, something I couldn’t immediately name, something that looked unsettlingly like guilt forced onto a face that had never expected to wear it.

"Étienne?" she said. The name came out barely above a breath.

I let it sit in the air between us.

I looked at her on the floor and did my best to hide the amusement that badly wanted to force itself out of the dark.

"Who is that?" I said.