Chapter 80: Kin 1
SÉVERINE
"I believe we are kindred spirits," I said.
He said nothing. The silence stretched between us, and I let it, because it felt necessary somehow.
Some silences needed to breathe before they became useful.
"I am in love with Theodore." I kept my voice even. "And you love Margaux."
Chris looked at me for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and deliberate.
"And how does the fact that you love that psycho concern Margaux exactly?" He tilted his head in a mocking manner and in any other situation, I would have made him eat his words but I needed him at the moment. So I allowed it to slide and let him continue his assault on my person. "If you did, you could have helped us all out and taken him off the market. But you didn’t. So a little part of me does wonder where the fuck this conversation is headed to."
"Do not lash out at me."
He made a sound low in his throat that was not quite a laugh. He found this hilarious apparently.
"When I said we are kindred spirits, I meant it in more ways than one." I folded my hands. "You love her. You could have proposed marriage. You could have secured her before any of this began."
Something crossed his face. Brief, and then gone. I liked it and I intended to provoke him even more.
"I was going to," he said. "I was."
I laughed. Not unkindly, but honestly, and I did not try to soften it into something more palatable.
"Really?" I let the word settle. "Because I think why you held back was simply because some part of you already knows she does not love you the way you love her. Not as intimately. Not as deeply. Not as madly."
He looked like he wanted to say something sharp in retaliation but I didn’t want to waste time with some back and forth so I raised a hand.
"I actually understand that better than you think. I am not mocking you." I paused. "It is the same way with me Theodore. Well... At least I am his fiancée."
I lifted my left hand for him to see right there and then. The rose diamond caught what little light the corridor offered, and it threw color across the stones between us.
The effect on him was immediate.
He moved forward in one fast motion, closing the distance to the cell door, his jaw tight and his eyes fixed on the ring.
"Wait... Fiancee? Does that bastard intend to take multiple wives?"
I lowered my hand.
"That is not what I want at all." I met his gaze. "I do not want to share Theodore. That is exactly why I want to help you. You get Margaux. I get Theodore all to myself."
"I don’t need to hold your hand for anything." His voice had gone flat again. He was trying so hard to show that he was in control. "It is not as though Margaux loves that bastard."
I smiled before I could stop myself.
"Don’t tell me you don’t see it."
"See what?"
"How they act around each other."
"I don’t." He said it with the conviction of someone who had decided not to see it. "I see a woman who hates a monster to the very core. In fact... the only reason she is even here is to save disadvantaged members of our pack. The people who would suffer first in a war. That is why she came. That is the only reason. Nothing else and nothing more."
"I am sure it was that way before she actually met him."
That was when the quiet that followed my familiar ended as his voice quietly cut through without moving from where he drifted, invisible behind my shoulder.
"Are you trying to mark him?""
I did not answer him. He knew better than to expect an answer, and the conditions were close enough that I was watching the air between Chris and myself with more focus than I was letting show.
"Stamping the mark of sacrifice on an Omega is one thing," my familiar said. "Who the heck would miss them? But a Beta is a whole different game. Especially one from a rival pack. Think this through, Mistress."
"I don’t want to sacrifice him," I said.
Chris looked at me funny. I probably sounded insane to him. But I couldn’t linger on that. I was close to getting what I wanted here.
"I’m sorry." I drew myself back. "I get passionate about this topic."
He watched me with nothing but distrust coloring his face.
"It is just when I think about why I am so afraid and why I want to make this stupid deal with you in the first place, I get chills. I don’t know if you know this but they have a mate bond," I said.
The words landed exactly as I had calculated they would. His face did something complicated, a series of small shifts that moved through denial before settling into the same stupid thing.
Denial.
"No." He shook his head slowly. "Why would the goddess... Why would she do that?"
"I have been in that state of mind." I kept my voice measured. "It does not help, like I said, they have history."
"History?" His eyes sharpened. "You keep saying that. What kind of history would Margo have with Theo Valcourt?"
"No." My familiar’s voice came quiet and firm. "You cannot determine where this fire you want to start will go. End this here."
I ignored him.
I watched Chris’s face and the conditions that were so close to being met for me to brand him with the mark of sacrifice shimmered between us.
His attention was entirely mine. His need was entirely exposed. His love for her sat right beneath his skin like a bruise, tender and unresolved, and I knew what happened when you pressed the right place on a bruise.
"I would be doing such a good deed telling you."
"Fucking spill it already."
The conditions settled.
"There is no Theodore Valcourt," I said. "Not anymore."
I watched him.
"In his place is Étienne. Étienne Archambault."
His eyes bore into mine. The silence lasted for one beat, then two, before he then broke it by moving.
"Archambault?" He pulled back and then paced, making one sharp turn, while his hand went to the back of his neck. "You cannot be serious."
"You know the name?"
"The late Beta family of Beaumont." His voice had gone strange, thinner than it had been. He stopped moving and his head dropped forward. "The files... That is why he wanted the files." He hit the platinum bars with the flat of his palm, hard enough that the whole cell door rattled badly. "How could I be so dumb?"
He breathed. Slow, and deliberate. The kind of thing that was a decision rather than a reflex.
"Margo knows?"
I felt it the moment the mark settled into him. It moved through the space between us like heat moving through water, not visible in any way, yet present enough to sear into his soul. He was mine now.
I hid my smile.