Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

They moved toward me while I was still standing.

Both of them crossed the dining room with the unhurried certainty of things that had no reason to hurry, their translucent forms passing through the space between chairs and bodies without disturbing anything. I kept my eyes on the table in front of me and my hands at my sides, while I focused on breathing at a normal rate.

Theodore had ascended. I had seen and felt it happen. The gold thread releasing from Laurent’s finger, the particular quality of something finally laid to rest after years of being held in place by grief. So whatever these two were, they were not the same Theodore I had helped in the infirmary. That one had gone somewhere else.

One of them stopped beside me.

"You already helped with Laurent." The voice arrived the same way Theodore’s had, settling into my mind rather than my ears. "Can you help with my father and my sister?"

I looked straight ahead.

The other one had taken its position behind Dorian’s chair, standing with the stillness of something that had been waiting for a very long time and had made peace with the waiting.

I shifted my attention back to Céline now that the one behind her was no longer there, because she was still the safest person in the room to fixate on and because my eyes needed somewhere to go. And in a similar fashion to before, I found threads around her fingers. They came off her in several directions, each carrying a different shade and weight. One ran to Dorian, black and dense, the shade of something that had been accumulating for years without release. One ran to Laurent, thinner but the same dark quality. One ran to Étienne, also black, wrapped around a complexity I could not untangle from this distance.

Then I found the one running toward me.

It was a shocking color. Gold. Clean, bright, and entirely inconsistent with everything else attached to her. I had no context for it and no time to build any, so I noted it and let it sit.

Chris’s voice pulled me back to the room.

"I apologize." He said it to the table and then made himself direct it at Dorian specifically, and I could hear what it cost him in the evenness of his delivery. "I was disrespectful. I spoke out of turn in your house, and I had no right to conduct myself the way I did."

Dorian looked at him.

The look lasted long enough to make its own point.

"So your common sense returns," he said, "because a woman stood up to your foolishness. Is this the Beaumont way? Are you all cucks to women or something?"

Chris said nothing.

"I do not forgive you." Dorian reached for his wine with ease. "You were rude in my home, to my face, at my table. That requires something more than words." He set the glass down. "If you want to leave this estate with your life, you will fight Valcourt’s Beta. To the death."

Laurent’s composure fractured for just a moment. A small and quickly controlled thing, but I saw it.

"Father." Étienne’s voice came in carefully.

"Sit this one out, Theodore."

The table held its breath.

Étienne sat down.

I watched it happen and felt something I could not immediately categorize move through me. To see him fold that back without visible resistance, to watch him absorb the instruction from his adoptive father and comply with it in front of everyone at the table, was not something I had seen from him before. Even though his heart spoke a different story, I knew it was not weakness. It was something more deliberate and more complicated than weakness. But from where I stood, it looked like deference, and deference from Étienne was a thing I had not prepared for.

I looked at Chris.

He had gone very still with his hands flat on the table, and I recognized why he was being this way. It was the stillness of a person who understood that the current situation had his name on it and had nowhere to redirect that knowledge. He blamed himself completely. I could see it in the set of his jaw and in the way he didn’t look at me.

I looked at Shanelle.

She was looking back at me with an expression I had seen on her face exactly once before. The same one I had seen when she had arrived at Valcourt. Fear. For my sake. She was seeing in real time that I had been bullshitting, and I was not a protected class here. She was already composing what she would tell my mother. I could practically hear the sentences forming behind her eyes, and I thought about my mother receiving them, processing them, making her calculation, and arriving at whatever response her calculation produced. I thought about whether that response would be the kind that moved toward me or the kind that absorbed the information and folded it neatly away behind composed features.

I thought about what it felt like to already know the answer to that question and to still be hoping you were wrong.

This was what powerlessness felt like from the inside. Not the concept of it, but the actual interior of it, the specific sensation of standing in a room where the only available currency was the performance of your own smallness to a man who had already decided your value before you sat down. I had grown up watching women navigate this from the outside, and eventually, even I had to perform it; I had told myself I understood it.

But... I had not understood it at all.

I hated it. Completely and without reservation.

I pulled my chair back and went to my knees on the dining room floor.

The stone was hard through the fabric of my dress. I kept my spine straight and my eyes on Dorian, and I made my voice carry clearly.

"He is a fool who does not know his place." I held his gaze. "I will not argue otherwise. But I am asking you to show him mercy for my sake. He is here because of me. Whatever he owes you for his conduct tonight, I am asking you to set it aside and let it rest with me instead."

Dorian looked down at me.

The satisfaction that moved through his expression was especially sickening to see. It made me see that the mess that was happening had nothing to do with Chris’ disrespect alone, but also humbling me for whatever reason. He liked this. That was the honest read of his face.

"I do like you like that," he said.

I said nothing.

"But it is not sufficient on its own." He leaned back slightly. "If you genuinely want me to spare your fool, do something for me in return." He let the pause sit. "Go to the kitchen and make me a beef wellington."

"She cannot—"

"You have been extraordinarily defensive about this girl all evening, Theodore." Dorian’s voice sharpened, the first real edge I had heard from him. "I do not enjoy having my tone matched by my own son at my own table. I would encourage you to consider that."

I stood up.

I looked at Shanelle. Her face had the specific horror of someone watching a person they love agree to something catastrophic in real time. I looked at Chris, who had gone grey with the particular flatness of someone absorbing a guilt they had no way to put down.

Beef Wellington. I had eaten it twice. Both times, someone else had made it and set it in front of me, and I had not paid the slightest attention to how. Whatever it required, it required precision, time, and knowledge I did not currently possess, and no one at this table was going to help me acquire any of it in the hours that were going to follow.

No one was going to help me at all.

Dorian had structured the demand to make that explicit, and he had done it with the ease of someone who had built traps so many times that the architecture had become instinct.

An Omega appeared at the edge of the room.

"I will lead you to the kitchen, Luna."

"You do it alone." Dorian’s voice followed me from his chair. "I want to understand the depth of how much you want him to live." A brief pause followed. "We will all remain here until you are finished. Three hours should be more than adequate." Another pause came from him. It was shorter this time and heavier. "If it takes considerably longer than that, my patience may find other things to occupy it."

I understood it as a threat, regardless of how pleasantly it was delivered.

"Of course, Father-in-law," I said.

I immediately began to follow behind the Omega toward the door when I heard Étienne’s voice rumble through the room.