Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

"Thank you," I said to Laurent. "For being proactive."

My voice sounded steady, steadier than anything I felt beneath the surface. Laurent nodded, already catching the truth behind my words: I was grateful he had fired when he did, because I could not have.

I faced the sentinels clustered in the corridor outside Séverine’s empty room and ordered them to scatter. Search every corner of the estate. Every exit. The grounds, the outbuildings, anywhere someone might emerge if they meant to return or to flee.

"She can teleport," I said. "Which means she can appear anywhere she wants, and she can disappear from anywhere we have her cornered. Make sure every sentinel who was not here understands that before they approach her."

They moved.

I glanced back at the room, my stomach twisting in slow, uneasy knots.

This was the room she had claimed for years. I had walked its floor, sat in its chairs, slept in its bed, spoken words I believed were real, the kind shared by people who truly knew each other. Standing in the doorway, I studied the ordinary pieces of her life, searching for the invisible line where the act began and wondering if it had ever ended.

I could not find it.

"Laurent."

He turned from his phone. "Elder Gérard Montclair needs to be brought in for questioning. Whatever Séverine has done inside this estate, every crime, every attack, the framing, the staged assault on herself, all of it. Her grandfather had to have known something. That relationship existed for a reason, and I want to understand what he was aware of and what he facilitated."

"I will arrange it."

He moved away down the corridor, phone already raised.

I stood alone for a moment.

How had I not seen it?

That was the question that kept arriving regardless of how many times I redirected my attention toward something practical and actionable. I had known her for years. I had been close enough to her that I had trusted her with parts of myself I did not show most people, and none of it had triggered a single alarm that something fundamental was wrong. My wolf had apparently, on a surface level, been more perceptive, had registered something consistently off about her that I had attributed to his general distrust of anyone in my orbit because of my trauma, but I had not listened to that either.

She had been playing with me the entire time.

The truth was still taking shape in my mind, each new piece darker than the last. The attacks on Margaux. The framing of Prim. The staged assault, the bathroom floor, the broken hand, the bruises I had sat beside, guilt gnawing at me. Every act was intentional, each one crafted to press on the weaknesses she had mapped out in me over years of careful study.

My wolf surfaced.

"She attacked Margaux twice. Framed someone. Hurt herself. The goal was you. It has always been you."

The full, sickening clarity crashed over me.

The infirmary. Her hands clutching at my shirt. The desperation in her voice when she asked me why I would not choose her, when she said she would become whatever version of herself I needed her to be.

And underneath that memory, a new one forming.

If she was desperate enough to do all of that to keep me, what would she do now that she had nothing left to lose?

Fear struck me, sudden and absolute.

I ran.

I burst into the infirmary. But to my utter shock, there was no Margaux. No head healer. Only empty cots and the heavy silence that lingers in a room recently left behind.

The mate bond was quiet but present, which meant she was alive, which was the only thing I clung to as I turned and ran back out.

I headed for our room.

I pushed the door open and found Shanelle on her phone, Chris in handcuffs against a wall, his face a mix of guilt and defiance. I barely registered them, moving past without pause.

"Where is Margaux?" I heard my own voice come out louder than I intended.

Shanelle looked up. Concern flickered across her face, sharpening into alarm as she read whatever was written on mine.

"I do not know," she said. "She told me to stay here. She looked—" She stopped herself.

I was already back in the corridor.

I stopped walking.

I had never done this before. Not deliberately, not with intention. The bond had reached through on its own, uninvited, during moments when one of us was unguarded, but I had never been the one to initiate contact, to open it myself.

But this time I had not a care in the world. I reached into it.

It was not like reaching through water. It was more like touching something that had been waiting for me, something that turned toward me the instant I reached out. I sensed her presence, the unique signature I had come to know since she arrived, and then I felt her direction, a pull as if the mate bond had always been a taut cord I had only now grasped.

I ran toward it.

Through the east corridor, up the main staircase, down the wing that led toward the older part of the estate, and she was there.

She stood in the corridor ahead, the head healer two steps behind. Her eyes met mine, surprise flickering before her expression shifted into something far more complex.

I reached her and put my arms around her before either of us had time to calculate whether that was the right thing to do.

She was warm, solid and real, and I held on with a force I made no effort to moderate.

"I am so glad you are safe," I said against her hair.

She let me hold her.

After a moment, her arms came up, and her hands found my back, and she said against my shoulder, "So I assume that Séverine revealed herself?"

"Yes." I pulled back enough to look at her face. "I am sorry."

"Are you alright?"

I did not answer. There was no simple answer, and she seemed to sense it, choosing not to press.

Laurent appeared at the end of the corridor, moving fast.

"Has Séverine been found?" I asked immediately. "Any word?"

He glanced at me, then at Margaux, and his expression shifted, bad news settling into careful lines across his face.

"No," he said.

Margaux’s eyes went wide. "Wait- she escaped?"

"The news I come bearing is worse than that, actually." He stopped in front of us. "Prim is dead. The sentinels reached the border village. Her house was burned down. The whole family, most likely, is dead too."

I heard Margaux’s breath leave her.

My chest tightened around the news, the logic of it landing with immediate, merciless force.

"Séverine did this," I said. "To cover her tracks."

The moment the words left my mouth, something struck me hard across the face.