Chapter 93: The Call
MARGAUX
My mother’s voice came through the speaker, and the first thing I felt was the particular dread of someone who already knew the answer to a question they hadn’t finished asking yet.
She had intercepted Shanelle. That was the only explanation. Shanelle had not made it to Valcourt because my mother had found her first, which meant my mother now had the file, or knew about it, or both. And if she did not let it go, if she actually refused to put those papers in Shanelle’s hands and send them across the border, then something I had been circling for days would stop being a gnawing fact I hated to look at and become the simple truth.
That she had done it. That she had known, and she had still been part of it.
I already believed that. I had believed it since Étienne laid out the logic of it, piece by careful piece. But belief and true confirmation were not the same thing, and there was a particular violence in the moment the hammer finally hit the nail. I did not know how many more of those moments I could absorb before something in me stopped resetting.
"Hello, Margaux."
For a second, I forgot how to breathe.
The corridor disappeared. The phone in my hand felt heavier. I was not sure where this was going, and that one moment of weakness felt like a knife being forced into my side. I took a deep, long breath and made an attempt to answer her. But no words came.
"Margaux." Her voice came again. "Are you there?"
"I’m here," I finally said.
I had to get over it.
"You sound tired."
"I’m fine."
There was a pause. It was as if she were measuring something, I could tell by the shape of the silence.
"This file," she said. "You said he needs it to find a traitor who sold information."
"That’s right."
"Of Valcourt specifically."
"Yes."
"And the Archambaults were the ones who bought it."
I kept my voice even. "That’s what I understand."
There was another pause. It was longer this time. I knew what she was doing. She was looking for the seam, the place where my answer didn’t quite fit the shape of the question, the small inconsistency that would tell her I was protecting something. My mother had spent her whole life reading rooms and reading people, and she had not lost the skill just because I needed her to.
"Are you sure that’s all it is?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Because you sound like you are choosing your words very carefully."
"I am always careful with my words," I said. "You raised me that way... remember. And maybe I still hold some resentment, given that I was a sacrifice everyone was willing to abandon. Even you."
She went quiet again when she heard me say that.
I looked at Étienne. He stood a few feet away, half turned toward me, his phone lowered. He could hear my end of the conversation clearly and probably enough of hers to follow the thread of it. His face had shifted from the controlled blankness he usually wore into something more difficult to read, and through the bond, which surprisingly was not sealed up shut this time around, I felt it before I could name it. Heat, low and sustained, the kind that came not from warmth but from something much older and more dangerous.
I did not need a seer to guess why he had that reaction. The mention of his family’s name in my mother’s voice had done something to him.
I had expected him to reach for the phone. To end the call, or take it from me, or do something that would make much worse in equal measure. To my surprise, however, he didn’t move. He just stood there and let me hold it, and that stillness cost him something. I could feel the cost of it through the bond.
My mother spoke again.
"Margaux. If something is wrong, you can tell me."
"Nothing is wrong."
"You are in an estate you have never been to, a pack you did not want to be affiliated to, married to a man you only met at the altar, and you are calling me through someone else’s phone." Her voice was measured, but something beneath it had begun to fray. "Forgive me for pushing."
"You are forgiven," I said. "But I meant what I said. I am just trying to make this work. That is all. I am sure Shanelle must have told you what bringing those files would do. They would ensure Chris’s release and... and they would help me. Help me live a more decent life here."
"And you really believe those files will help."
"I believe they will make my life better here. Yes." I looked at Étienne when I said it. I did not look away. "I have sacrificed enough for this pack, Mother. Surely the pack can give me one thing."
There was silence. I hated how manipulative I was being. But it was necessary.
"Surely you will help me out." I let the words land one at a time. "Or will you not? If not for me, then for Chris."
What came back through the line was not a word or a sentence. It was a sound. Short, barely audible, the kind of thing that should not have meant anything and meant everything because I had never heard it from her before. Not once. My mother probably cried behind closed doors, but in public, she maintained composure everywhere else, and the line between those two spaces had always been absolute.
The sound that came through the phone was neither.
It was her voice breaking, not with drama or intention, just fracturing briefly at the edge of something she hadn’t expected to feel this sharply. It lasted less than a second, and then she pulled herself back together, but I had already heard it.
I had never heard that before in my life.
"I am not cruel," she said.
Her voice was steady again, but the steadiness was deliberate now, assembled in real time. I could hear the assembly of it.
"If this is what you truly believe will give you a decent life with those— with them, then I do not care for that file. I know you would never make a choice that would jeopardize your pack. Or your family."
The word family landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. Mental circles were spreading outward before I could stop them.
I thought about Étienne in a trafficking house, and had a vivid flash of imagination at the sick and downright desperate despair he would have fallen into to believe that pouring silver and wolfsbane across his own face so he would be worth less was the way forward. The only path forward . I thought about his parents burning in the rain while someone held his head forward and made him watch. I thought about my uncle driving a car on a dark road, telling a fifteen-year-old boy his survival meant a payout.
I thought about my family.
The guilt was not small, and it did not pass quickly. I stood in it for a moment, and then I stepped through it, not because it wasn’t deserved but because standing in it would not help anyone.
"Thank you," I said. "Please make sure it gets here."
"It will." She said, and even that was followed by a pause. "But ensure it is returned, Margaux."
"It will be."
I then ended the call.
The corridor settled back into quiet. I held Chris’s phone for a moment without moving, looking at nothing in particular, letting the last thirty seconds finish echoing through me before I turned around.
Étienne was still watching me.
Not the way he usually watched me, with that calculating steadiness that made me feel cataloged and assessed. This was different. The guardedness was still there, but it had receded, and what was underneath it was something I did not have a word for yet.
"The files are coming," I said. "She will send them. The only condition is that they be returned when you are done."
He said nothing immediately.
I felt him through the bond, not loudly, just present in the way he was when he had stopped working to keep me out. Something had shifted in the last few minutes while I was on that call, and I did not know which part of it had moved him.
"What?" I said.
His mouth opened, and he was about to say something when we both heard a familiar voice call to us.
"Sorry to disturb whatever is going on, "Laurent’s voice came from the far end of the corridor. He was walking toward us quickly, a tablet in his hand, his expression carrying the particular urgency of someone who had already decided what they were about to say was not optional.
He stopped a few feet away and held the tablet out.
"But you are going to want to see this," he said. "Both of you."