Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

I watched the car until the drive curved and took it from sight.

The absence of it was immediate and specific, the mate bond thinning in the way it thinned when distance began to accumulate between us, not breaking, not even close, but stretching in a way that made the air feel slightly less correctly calibrated.

I stood at the top of the estate steps and recognized that I was being sentimental about a woman who had barely left the grounds for one day, which was an entirely new category of embarrassing to add to everything else the last week had produced.

Then I heard footsteps behind me.

I turned.

A sentinel stood at the base of the steps, bowing.

"Alpha Theo—" He stopped.

I waited.

He straightened and tried again.

"Alpha Étienne," he said.

The mention of my true name caused my eyes to widen significantly.

"I apologize if that causes offense," he said quickly. "It is what Alpha Dorian instructed us to use."

Something moved through my chest that I did not have an immediate word for. Warm and slightly destabilizing.

"When did that even happen?" I asked.

"Last night," the sentinel said. "He was very thorough about it."

"Was he now..." I looked back at the empty drive for a moment, then back at the sentinel. "I assume he also has a message."

"He would like to speak with you. He is in his study."

"Thank you," I said.

I walked through the estate and knocked on Dorian’s study door.

"Come in."

He was at his desk when I entered, not working, just sitting in the way old men sometimes sat when they were thinking rather than doing. He had one hand flat on the desk’s surface, the morning light coming through the window at an angle that softened everything it touched.

"I got your message," I said. "You wanted to talk."

"Sit down," he said.

I listened and sat.

He looked at me for a long moment before he then deeply cleared his throat.

"I owe you an apology," he said.

I said nothing at first. I wasn’t even exactly sure what I was waiting for.

"What I did," he said, "when I found you. Taking you in, giving you a name and a position, building a life around the idea that Theodore had somehow been returned to me." He stopped. His jaw worked. "I used you. I used your circumstances and your vulnerability to construct something that served my grief and never asked whether it served you."

"You also kept me alive," I said.

"That does not cancel the other thing." He held my gaze. "Your trauma. What had been done to you, what you had survived before I found you. I was aware enough of it to know it was significant and not enough of it to actually reckon with it. I let you play a role in my theater of grief without ever asking what the cost of it was to you."

"It was useful to me too," I said. "I want to be honest about that. I was not a passive participant. I had reasons for staying that had nothing to do with obligation to you."

"The revenge," he said.

"Yes." I looked at him directly. "I needed the position to reach the people who had hurt me. I needed the resources and the authority and the credibility. Alpha Dorian, your grief and your desire to believe Theodore had come back to you gave me all of those things." I paused. "So I played the role because it served my purposes. Not because you forced it on me."

"We used each other," he said.

"Something like that."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You see me as a father figure," he said. "Despite everything."

"I lost my father," I said. "I was fifteen. I watched it happen and then I spent years in a place where I was entirely alone." I looked at the window. "You were present. You were consistent. You cared about me, even if the caring was filtered through your grief and directed at someone who was not quite me." I looked back at him. "Yes. Something like that developed. I do not think I chose it consciously. It simply happened."

"I do care about you," he said. "In a way that has nothing to do with my boy Theodore. You. Étienne." He said it like he was placing it somewhere it needed to go. "If you do not want to stay here, if this seat and this estate and all of it is not what you want, I understand that. You did not ask to be the heir of a pack that was not yours."

"I did not ask to be Theodore," I said. "But I also do not know where else I would go." I thought about Margaux. About the forget-me-nots. About the bond and what it had felt like when I reached into it and she was on the other end of it. "I am working on that."

He almost smiled.

"What about your daughter?

"My daughter," he said, holding on to that. "Céline."

"I care about her," he said. "Despite everything she has done. She is my blood and I understand the hunger that drove her, even if I cannot excuse the choices she made." He leaned back. "But the hunger was mine. I created the conditions for it by spending decades telling her in every way that mattered that she was secondary. That the seat was not for her. That her value was contingent on being useful to someone who did hold the seat." He stopped. "I played a hand in what she became."

"You did," I said. "I think she started from a genuine place. The desire to prove that you were wrong about her. That the choices you were making were not the right ones. Obsession does something to people. It narrows everything until there is only the one thing and you stop being able to see anything outside of it." I paused. "I know what that looks like from the inside. My revenge did the same thing. Everyone connected to what happened to my family had it coming. No gradations. No exceptions. Just the target and whatever it took to reach it."

"She killed her brother," he said.

"She planted the seed," I said. "But you watered it for years before she got there. I am not saying she is innocent. But I am asking whether you can wash your hands cleanly."

He was quiet for a long time.

"No," he said finally. "I cannot." His voice had lost something in the admission. "She will be charged regardless. Not for Theodore at least. That can be argued against with enough technical distance. But for poisoning me with clear intent, over a sustained period. That cannot go unaddressed." He looked at me. "I see her clearly. I always did, more than she knew. There is darkness in her that goes beyond what I put there. But I put some of it there, and that is mine to carry."

I nodded.

He looked at my face.

"It healed," he said.

I touched the left side automatically, the smooth skin under my fingertips still slightly surprising.

"I forgave myself," I said. "Or at least I started to. I stopped holding on to the idea that I needed to carry it alone and blame myself." I looked at him. "I guess something shifted when I realized that."

"Good," he said simply. "Lose the masks too. You do not need them anymore."

"The sentinel you sent called me Étienne this morning," I said, laughing a little. "Before I knew you had instructed them to."

"I did it last night," he said. "After we spoke. It seemed right." He leaned forward slightly. "You may not want this seat. I understand that. But can you still be my son? Whatever that looks like going forward?"

I looked at him. The old man who had pulled me from the ground when I should have been dead and built something around me that was not entirely right but was not entirely wrong either, and who was now, perhaps for the first time, simply asking me something rather than assuming the answer.

"Yes," I said. "I can do that."

He settled back into his chair, something easing in his face.

A knock came at the door.

"What is it?" Dorian said.

"Alpha Dorian." A sentinel’s voice from the other side. "There is a Luna at the edge of the territory. She did not use the arcs. She came through the natural routes."

"What Luna and why has she come?"

A pause filled the space before the sentinel then broke it.

"She is Luna Vivianne, From Beaumont."

I looked at Dorian.

Dorian looked at me.