Chapter 118: Purple
SÉVERINE
The knock yanked me out of the white.
I surfaced slowly, as if clawing my way out of something that had devoured me, and for a heartbeat I was adrift, unable to recall how I landed on the bed. The pillows, soft but icy, pressed against my cheek, and then memory crashed back—vivid, jagged, and unwanted.
My familiar hovered at the edge of my sight in his human shape, his gaze wrapped in that careful stillness he wore when silence served better than speech.
I sat up.
The knock came again.
"Before you fixate on me," he said, reading my face with the accuracy of something that had been watching me for years, "that boy from the prison cell is standing outside your door. My best guess is he watched what happened tonight and has reconsidered his position."
I looked at him for a long moment.
"We will have words," I said. "Later."
"I expected nothing less."
I stood and caught my reflection in the dresser mirror, pausing just long enough to confirm I looked composed, then moved toward the door.
The knock came a third time, slightly more impatient.
I crossed to the door and opened it.
Chris waited in the corridor, a sentinel stationed six feet behind him—close enough to be noticed, too far to catch a whisper. He looked at me like someone who had spent the last hour wrestling with himself and landed on a decision that still unsettled him.
I offered him a smile broad enough for the sentinel to read from his post.
"It is late," I said pleasantly. "What are you doing here?"
"I want to talk." His eyes moved briefly to the sentinel behind him and back to me. "Can I come in? And can you do something about that issue?"
I glanced past him at the sentinel with an expression of mild confusion. "Why? He is simply there because you are from an enemy pack. Better to take precautions than regret it later is the motto of many in these walls."
Chris lowered his voice. "He answers to the Beta. I think the name was Laurent. You know him, right? The dude seems very nosy, and if this Laurent finds out I came to you this late, he is going to want to know exactly what we discussed and how we even know each other. Is that not a problem for you?"
I considered Laurent: his relentless thoroughness, the way he tugged at threads others ignored and followed them with a patience stripped of ego. Yes. That would be a problem.
I lifted my hand, and the sentinel crumpled where he stood, silent as a coat slipping from its hook.
"Come in," I said.
Chris stepped over the threshold and looked at the unconscious sentinel and then back at me.
"Does that fix everything?" he asked.
"I will handle the rest. Do not worry about it." I closed the door and turned to face him. "So. Why are you here at this hour?"
"I want to hold your hand." He said it plainly, with the bluntness of someone who had decided the shortest path was the only one left. "You do what you must to get your Theodore back... or was it Etienne now? Well... I truly do not give a shit. I want Margaux."
I studied him.
"That is very straightforward of you," I said.
"I am a straightforward person."
"Did something happen tonight that clarified your thinking?"
His jaw tightened. "This pack humiliated her. She knelt on that floor, and I sat there and did nothing because I could not do anything, and I am not going to let that stand."
I had enjoyed the humiliation, right up until that foolish kiss, which still smoldered at the back of my mind.
"That is admirable," I said. "But I have to ask you something first." I held his gaze. "Does she love you?"
His face changed instantly. Not quite anger, but something close—something deeper, the look of someone confronted with a truth they had been skillfully avoiding.
He took a step toward me, and I took one back, which was an instinctive response I did not entirely control and did not appreciate having.
His eyes dropped to my hand.
I realized what he was looking for.
The ring. Or rather... the absence of it.
Only hours ago, I had hurled it at Étienne in the infirmary, and Chris’s eyes caught the absence, registering my bare finger and tucking the detail away.
"What about you?" he asked. "Does he love you?"
"I am his fiancée," I said.
"I do not know if you know this." He kept his voice level. "But they have a history. A real one. I know Margaux. For a long time, she grieved him. So if that dude is really an Archambault, I am sure that kind of history does not just disappear."
"I know," I said. "I found out recently how deep that shit goes." I held his gaze. "Which is precisely why I intend to address it at the root before it grows any further. Something is going to happen soon, and I need you to help me further create a rift between them when the moment comes. That is all. You hold up your end, and I hope—" I paused, making it sound like genuine concern rather than calculation, "I hope her heart can find its way to you. If it cannot, then you will be of no use to me, and we part ways."
"Her heart is mine," he said, and the certainty in it was the kind that came from someone who had been telling himself that long enough that the belief had become structural.
"Then that settles it," I said. "Goodnight."
He blinked. "That is all?"
"For tonight, yes. Tomorrow, be ready. Something will happen, and you need to get the work the moment it arrives."
"How will I know? I am supposed to leave tomorrow."
"Trust me," I said. "You will know. It is going to be explosive."
He turned to go, then stopped with his hand near the door.
"The sentinel," he said.
"He will be behind you shortly. Just walk at a normal pace."
He nodded in understanding and then left.
I stood in the quiet of the room after the door closed and let the performance drop for exactly three seconds, because three seconds was all I could afford.
Then I turned to my familiar.
"I have a great many things to say to you," I said. "About autonomy and what it means and where exactly your authority over my consciousness begins and ends. But there is no time for that now." I crossed toward the corridor door. "Call the Omega here while I deal with the sentinel’s memories. Or am I being unnecessarily risky keeping this all moving tonight?"
He considered it for exactly one second and then snapped his fingers, dissolving into nothing.
At least he was being obedient again.
I crouched beside the unconscious sentinel and pressed two fingers gently to his temple. The surface of his mind was easy to find, as all sleeping minds are—unguarded, soft at the edges. I slipped in, found the last ten minutes, and began to work.