Chapter 154: loml
ÉTIENNE
"There is no way," I said.
"It is the truth."
"How would you even know something like that?" I looked at her, searching for something I could use to pull this apart. "On what basis are you standing here telling me this?"
She told me.
Margaux held my gaze. "There is another Theodore. Not the one I helped move on with Laurent. A different fragment of him, still here, still tethered to this estate. He was attached to Céline."
"Attached how?"
"Following her. Haunting her. Watching everything she did." She paused. "I went to Céline’s study this morning to speak to him through her. He was not the same version I met before. He was angry. Not sad. Angry."
"And he told you it was Séverine."
"Yes. Before he faded."
"Just like that."
"Not just like that." Her voice stayed even. "He told me other things first. Things about Céline, things I had no way of knowing, that turned out to be true the moment I looked at her face. He had no reason to lie to me. He had nothing left to gain."
I turned away from her, then back. "A ghost told you that Séverine of all people is a witch."
"Yes," she said quietly. "And I believe him. That is what I am telling you."
I looked at the head healer, who was studying the wall with great interest, pretending not to listen.
"Did you catch any of that?" I asked him.
"I..." he said carefully as if he was hearing the most crazy story. The head healer then cleared his throat. "I am sorry," he said, with the careful tone of a man who had decided to approach this delicately. "When you say Theodore, you mean—"
"She means exactly what she said," I told him.
He looked between the two of us and wisely chose silence.
I turned back to Margaux. "She was attacked. I saw the state she was in with my own eyes. The broken hand. What was done to her throat."
"She did that to herself," Margaux said. "To get your sympathy back. Your guilt."
I went still.
"She would not do that," I said. "Whatever else I thought I knew about her today, I know she would not do that to herself deliberately. That is not something a person who is right in the head does. She is not some psycho bitch!"
"It is not Prim," Margaux said. "She was framed!"
"I fucking know that! But it could be someone else that we were not aware of."
"Étienne."
"I am not dismissing it." The words came out sharper than I meant. "I am telling you I need more than a ghost’s testimony delivered through the only person in this estate who can apparently see ghosts."
It was so cruel. But I did not know what else to do after hearing that.
"I understand that." She kept her voice steady. "You do not have to take my word for it. You do not have to believe it at all right now. Just go and disprove it. Put on a show long enough to see what happens when she is confronted properly."
The door opened.
Laurent stepped in, read the room in under three seconds, and looked at Margaux.
"What happened?"
She told him.
Laurent listened the way he listened to everything, with the focused attention of someone already processing implications before the sentence had finished. When she stopped speaking, he was already moving.
"Right," he said. "I will coordinate with the sentinels and have people at her door inside ten minutes. If she uses magic in front of witnesses, that ends the question."
"Can everyone just stop for one moment." The words left me louder than I planned.
They both looked at me.
I felt a hand on my arm.
Margaux.
"I know what this feels like," she said, quieter now, the urgency stripped back to something more careful. "She was there for you during a period when very few people were. She understood things about you that required real intimacy to understand. Those things are real, Étienne. I am not standing here asking you to pretend they were not."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I am asking you to trust that I would not come running in here with something like this if I was not certain." She held my gaze. "My gut has been telling me something was wrong with this situation since the attack footage. The familiar who lingered after Prim left.She also did something to my pack’s Beta. All of it connects. I trust where this came from." She paused. "You are allowed to doubt it. Just go and disprove it before you decide I am wrong."
I looked at her hand on my arm and then away.
"I have already done the worst thing I could do today," I said.
"What does that mean?"
I stepped back before she could ask it again, turning toward Laurent because turning toward the window would have been too obvious.
The mate bond did not lie. That was the thought I kept returning to underneath everything else, underneath the denial and the resistance and the very reasonable desire to find another explanation. The bond had never lied to me. And Margaux’s certainty came through it like a current, clean and unambiguous.
"Do it," I said to Laurent.
He was already on his phone.
Margaux stepped forward beside me. "I am coming with you."
"No." I did not look at her when I said it.
"Étienne—"
"Stay in the infirmary." I kept my voice even. "The healer is here. You are safer in this room than you are anywhere near what is about to happen."
"I am not made of glass."
"I know that." I finally looked at her. "But if she is what you say she is, and she still has access to her familiar, I cannot be watching the door and watching you at the same time. So stay here."
She held my gaze for a moment, reading something in my face, and then stepped back without pushing further.
I then turned to Laurent. "Let’s go."
We moved through the corridors and I let the silence sit between us until I could not anymore.
"You never liked her," I said.
"No," Laurent said. "I never did. I want to be honest with you about that before you accuse me of it later."
"Then how am I supposed to trust your judgment on this?"
"Because my not liking her and her being what Margaux says she is are not mutually exclusive." He kept his eyes forward. "I never liked her because there was always something underneath the surface that I could not identify. I thought it was bias. I told myself it was bias for years." He paused. "But it was something else. Some quality she carried that never quite matched the rest of her. I felt it every time she was in a room."
"That is not evidence."
"No," he agreed. "It is not. But the DNA results will be. And what we might find out soon."
We reached the sentinels positioned along the corridor outside her door, arranged with the quiet efficiency of people who had been briefed properly.
Laurent tried to put a weapon in my hand.
I let it sit in the air between us until he pulled it back.
The lead sentinel looked at me. I nodded once.
The door came open hard.
"Freeze! You are under arrest for the attacks on Luna Margaux Beaumont, for the conspiracy to frame an Omega servant for criminal acts, and for the suspected practice of unauthorized dark magic within Valcourt territory."
Séverine’s eyes found mine across the room before anything else, and the expression on her face was not guilt and it was not calculation. It was confusion. Genuine, wide-eyed confusion, and the tears that came with it looked entirely real.
"What is happening?" Her voice cracked on the words. "Étienne, what is this? Why are they—"
"Is it you?" I stepped forward past the raised weapons, past Laurent’s warning hand on my shoulder. "I need you to tell me. Are you the witch?"
"What?" She shook her head, something almost like a laugh escaping her through the tears. "Of course not. Why would you even ask me that? What has she told you?"
"Séverine—"
"Whatever that girl has said to you, she is lying." Her voice climbed with something urgent underneath it. "You know me, Étienne. You know me better than anyone in this room. Look at me and tell me you actually believe this."
"I know," I said. "I know it cannot be you. But... wait... How would you—"
The shot split the sentence clean open.
The air displacement hit my shoulder. Close. Too close.
I spun.
The space where Séverine had been standing held nothing.
No impact. No wound. No body on the floor. Just empty air and the wall behind it, unmarked.
Laurent lowered the weapon.
The room held the ringing silence of something irreversible.
"There is your answer," he said.
I crossed to him in three steps and got close enough that the sentinels behind us would not catch the full exchange.
"What if she had not been the witch?" My voice came out low and rough. "What if you had just shot an innocent person in front of me?"
"She was not innocent." He held my gaze without apology. "She knew Margaux knew. That was written all over her the moment the door came open and she even said it with her own lips. She was probably already calculating her exit before the charges had finished being read." He paused. "Your care for her would not let you see it. It was going to get you hurt. I could not let that happen. I hope the bullet followed wherever she ran to at least."
I looked at the empty space on the floor where she had been standing. She had fucking teleported.
He was right.
That was the part that broke something open in my chest, not the confirmation of what she was, not even the vanishing itself, but the simple, unadorned fact that Laurent had seen clearly what I had been unable to see because I had not wanted to.
He had fired because I would not have.
And he had been right to do it.