Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

I fixed my expression in the same second I realized I had let it slip. The mask helped. I was grateful for the mask in a way I had never been before. I let something dismissive settle into my tone and said, "Wow. You really did hit your head hard."

She watched me. Like she did not quite believe I had pulled that educated guess right out of my ass.

So I went two steps further.

"So you hallucinated about Laurent’s ex from what you probably heard from gossiping staff and then retraumatized him?" I started walking again. "Because that is what I am getting from this."

"Fuck you."

The two words landed clean and unambiguous. It told me I successfully had her off my back. So I kept walking.

The infirmary smelled of dried herbs and something faintly medicinal underneath. The head healer looked up from a table of supplies when we came in, and his face registered something he tried to neutralize quickly when his eyes landed on me.

"Is something wrong?" He directed the question at Margaux with the careful tone of someone who was not entirely sure what he was walking into.

"Not with me." She moved out of the doorway and gestured slightly in my direction. "He is the one who needs to be here. His leg is hurt badly."

The healer’s attention shifted, and I watched the professional concern override whatever personal discomfort my presence had produced in him.

He had clearly thought I had come here to throw hellfire and brimstone at him for releasing her early.

He gestured toward the nearest bed.

I sat. The shift in position drew a flare of pain up from the ankle that I did not let reach my face.

He crouched down and examined it with gloved hands. He pressed two fingers carefully just above the joint, and I heard Margaux step closer from somewhere slightly behind my left shoulder.

"That is bad." He said it with the tone of someone making a professional observation rather than expressing judgment. "It is having difficulty healing because it keeps getting reinjured. Every time it starts to close, something aggravates it, and the process resets. Your incessant walking, I would assume."

He stood, moved toward the shelving along the wall, and began scanning the labeled jars there. "Forty minutes of rest after I apply this, and the Alpha should be moving normally. The tissue needs stillness more than anything."

He began measuring and combining things from different jars. The sounds of his work filled the quiet.

Margaux had now settled near the foot of the bed, close enough that I was aware of exactly where she stood.

I looked at her profile while the healer worked.

"Let us say I even believe you." I kept my voice low. "What happened? With Laurent and..." I left the rest of the sentence unfinished because I did not know how to complete it without naming the person whose life I was currently living.

"He committed suicide." She said it quietly, without looking away from what the healer was doing. "It was either that he be his father’s son or be Laurent’s lover. He could not reconcile both of them. So he chose a path he thought would not disappoint either."

I said nothing for a moment.

"And you genuinely believe you saw a ghost."

"Laurent was there." She turned her head to look at me then. "You can ask him."

"I would not." The words came out with more gentleness than I intended. "He seems tender at the moment. I do not want to dig deeper into freshly open wounds."

She held my gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable and then looked away.

The healer worked quietly. The room settled into something that was not quite silence, more like a held breath.

"How is your mother?" The question left my mouth before I had reasoned through whether or not I wanted to ask it.

Margaux turned back to me. The look she gave me was one of measurement.

"That is a very specific question."

"Mental health issues tend to be hereditary." I held her gaze through the mask. "I will just say it plainly. I once heard your mother talking about something similar when we were younger. I was eavesdropping. I am not particularly proud of it." I paused. "And the things she said sounded similar to what you are saying."

"Keep me out of the conversation if you tell her, though. Or do not. I imagine Vivianne would be more than happy to finish what she started. And I would not mind a game that happens to be a show of teeth."

Margaux was quiet for long enough that I thought she was not going to answer.

Then the healer returned with a small bottle, something thick and pale inside, and ran through his instructions with the brisk clarity of someone who assumed the Alpha had places to be.

"I will do it." Margaux reached across and took the bottle from him before I could reach for it myself.

The healer’s voice droned on, offering instructions about keeping weight off it, about avoiding stairs, about recovery times that blurred together and faded almost as soon as they left his lips.

I lost track of every word the moment Margaux crouched at the foot of the bed.

She pulled the stopper from the bottle, releasing a sharp herbal scent that curled through the room. Her fingers closed gently around my ankle, careful despite the swelling, and something in my chest tightened so abruptly it irritated me.

She touched me as if I were something fragile.

The paste was cool against my skin. She worked it in slowly, her thumb gliding in patient circles as afternoon light spilled through the infirmary windows and tangled itself in her hair.

Sunlight shifted over it with every movement, drawing out deep blue beneath the strands, like metal glimpsed beneath water. It should not have mattered. Hair was hair. Light was light.

Yet I could not stop looking at her.

At the gentle concentration gathered between her brows. At the loose strand that had slipped near her cheek. The way her hands stayed steady while mine had gone uselessly tense beside me.

I thought she was beautiful.

The realization came quietly, without resistance, as if some part of me had known it for longer than I had allowed myself to admit.

Beautiful, and entirely too close.

Her fingers pressed lightly against the side of my ankle, and I inhaled too sharply before I could stop myself.

Margaux glanced up immediately.

Her eyes met mine for one brief second, searching my face for pain, and the concern there hit harder than the injury itself.

"Too much pressure?" she asked softly.

I should have answered.

Instead, I kept looking at her like an idiot.

Because the sun still touched the edge of her face and her hand still wrapped around my ankle, and there was something unbearably gentle in the way she held me, as if hurting me was the last thing she could ever do.

The healer was still speaking somewhere to my left.

Neither of us listened to him anymore.