Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

She looked at me without speaking. Of course, she had no idea about the history, but I did. I did a lot.

I crossed the remaining distance between us, or rather I tried to; my hand reaching for her the way my hands reached for things that needed to be held, stopped, or redirected, and it passed through her completely.

I stood there with my arm extended through empty air that felt faintly cold against my skin and forced myself to breathe.

"Favors," I said. "You can do favors, right? That is why you are here, and we have already made one. I want to make another. Use whatever you can do to fix him, and the healer too, and I will owe you something else. Something you want. Tell me what it is, and I will find a way to give it to you. Whatever it is."

"I wish I could help with this," she said.

"Why can’t you? You manifested physically. You split into two separate forms. You were able to affect the material world in ways that should not be possible." I heard my own voice fracturing at the edges. "Please do not hold back on me."

"I am not holding back." Her voice carried something I recognized as genuine. "I cannot do what you are asking. Healing the living is not within my access. I do not have that kind of reach or power. I am still dead."

I pressed my hands against my face and felt them shaking.

A groan came from behind me.

I spun.

The head healer was moving, his hand going to the back of his head, his eyes opening and then squeezing shut against the light.

I was beside him before he had fully registered where he was.

"You are awake." I helped him upright with both hands. "Thank the goddess you are awake. Étienne is badly injured. He needs you now. Right now."

He blinked, the daze still present, but something in him recognized the urgency in my voice and prioritized through it.

"What?" he said. "Where—"

"The infirmary. Laurent took him there."

He was on his feet before I had finished the sentence, swaying slightly, catching himself against the wall, and then he straightened and moved.

I followed him through the corridor and into the infirmary, and what I walked into was organized chaos: the Omega apprentices moving in clusters, their faces carrying the controlled fear of people who had been trained for difficult situations and were now facing one that exceeded the limits of their training.

Laurent was white.

Alpha Dorian, who had apparently been told or found his way here from wherever the earlier panicked voice had come from, was just as pale.

The head healer tore away from my side the moment he saw Étienne and crossed the room in six strides, his hands already reaching for the equipment being thrust toward him by an apprentice who looked enormously relieved to have someone more qualified present.

"Antiseptics," he said. "Gloves. Move."

They moved.

I stood at the edge of the activity, tried to make myself go closer, and found that my legs were not cooperating. The mate bond was present in my chest, as it always was, that low and constant awareness of him through it, and what it was communicating right now was diminishing. Not absent. Not gone. But smaller than it had been when we left the corridor, the signal pulling back toward something quieter and further away.

I had felt this before. The night I rejected him, the bond hadn’t snapped cleanly. It had frayed at first before it died, leaving glowing embers buried beneath the ash, stubborn enough to keep carrying echoes between us. And on that night in the rain, while his family burned around him, those dying threads had carried everything. His grief. His fury. His helplessness. The bond had stretched until it felt as though one more heartbeat would tear it apart forever. Before it eventually did.

Why did it feel like the same thing was happening to our second chance bond?

I was not going to feel it again.

I could feel him getting smaller through the bond.

Not absent. Not gone. But diminishing, the signal pulling back the way a voice pulled back when the person speaking it was walking away from you down a long corridor, and the fear of that particular sensation was so specific and so complete that it bypassed every other thought I was capable of having.

I reached into the bond the way you reached for a live wire, knowing it might hurt, not caring.

I pushed everything I had into it. Not words, not logic, not argument. Just the one thought that kept arriving louder than everything else. He had to live. I needed him to live. It was entirely selfish, and I did not have room in this moment to be anything except selfish, and I held that thought against the bond and pushed until my hands shook.

"What the fuck is going on?" Alpha Dorian’s voice came from behind me, loud and cracked with something that was not quite anger. "You are stitching him, and he keeps bleeding. What is wrong with him?"

The head healer did not stop working. "His healing factor is dampened. Significantly."

"From the wound?"

"Not from the wound alone." The healer’s eyes moved between the injury and his instruments. "There is no root or herb present that would cause this. Which means the suppression has a different origin."

I opened my eyes. "What does that mean?"

He looked at me. Then at Dorian. Then back at me, making a calculation I could see but not entirely read.

"Sometimes," he said carefully, "despair can cause it. When a person does not want to repair themselves, the body listens." A pause. "He does not want to fix himself."

"I noticed it earlier," I said. "When he was first injured from jumping from a great height. His healing was slower than it should have been. I registered it, but I did not—" I stopped. "I should have said something."

He swallowed. His eyes moved between Dorian and me one more time.

I crossed to the cot, reached through the working hands of two apprentices, took his hand, and nobody told me to move back.

The bond pulled smaller again.

I tightened my grip on his hand.

"Étienne." I leaned toward his face. "Listen to me. I know you are somewhere in there, and I know you can hear me because I can feel you through the bond, and it is still there." I pressed my other hand over the top of the one already holding his. "You cannot give up on yourself. You are not allowed to do that." My voice cracked, and I left it cracked because there was no point in managing it now. "If not for me, then for the reason you built all of this. The revenge. The boxes. Everything you have been working toward for years. You cannot go out like this. You cannot let this be how it ends."

He lay still.

Pale and still, and the bond kept pulling smaller.

My eyes blurred.

"Come on," I said, louder this time.

"Come on, Étienne."