Chapter 137: Hate the sin
VIVIANNE
"The Archambault files," I said.
The words left me on a breath that felt like it had been holding itself hostage in my chest for years. It felt good to say, actually. To look him in the face and say fuck it and fuck him.
Lucian went still.
This was not the calculated stillness he wore like armor in every other moment of his life. This was raw shock, his face flickering through emotions before landing on something rare for him. Fear, hastily disguised as fury, because fury was the only mask he ever let slip.
His hand moved toward my throat before I had time to brace for it.
His fingers clamped around my neck, pressure mounting so quickly that for a suspended heartbeat, I truly believed he meant to end it. Then something inside him snagged, a fraying thread of restraint not yet cut, and his grip slackened before it could truly harm me. He shoved me away instead, and I crashed into the wall, the picture frame beside my head rattling from the impact.
"Are you fucking insane?" His voice came out raw, stripped of its usual polish.
"I am." My own voice surprised me by how steady it sounded, given the throbbing in my throat. "I probably am."
"What the fuck would Valcourt want that for?" He paced two steps away and back, his hands moving through his hair, a gesture I had not seen from him since we were children and our father had still been alive to terrify us both equally. "Does that not strike you as odd? As something worth questioning before you handed it over like a fucking gift?"
"I do not care why he wants it." I pushed myself off the wall, refusing to let my legs show how unsteady they actually were. "It was the one thing my daughter needed. The Valcourt Alpha is searching for whoever sold Valcourt information to outsiders years ago. That is all he told her. That is all I needed to know."
"Fuck." He said it like a verdict, dragging both hands down his face. "And you do not think that comes back to me? To us? Let me explain something to you, since you seem to have forgotten how this family actually functions. Nobody falls alone in this house. Nobody."
"I am aware."
"Are you?" He rounded on me. "Because if that is even remotely true, do well to remember that Valcourt has had it out for this pack for a fucking long time now, and you hand him a file I personally edited, manipulated, buried under the right signatures and the right omissions, a case that never sat right with half the council to begin with—" He stopped himself, breathing hard. "The risks I had to take so no one would want to reopen it? Do you understand the thousand ways Valcourt could use that against Beaumont and, in turn, us?"
"Get over yourself, Lucian. Valcourt does not care about a murder we orchestrated years ago." I kept my voice level despite everything churning beneath it. "Everyone connected to that case is either your puppet, your accomplice, or dead. There is no one left to corroborate anything beyond what is already written."
"Oh, I do not know." His laugh came out sharp and humorless. "Perhaps they cross-reference it against the Royal family’s own archived records and notice the manipulation themselves. Perhaps they call the entire verdict into question publicly. Do you think that far ahead, Isabelle? Did you think at all?"
"Maybe I would," I screamed, the sound tearing out of me before I could measure it, "if I knew anything about politics! But I am just a dainty Omega woman with maggots for brains, apparently. You cannot blame me for being a woman."
He laughed then, a real laugh, the sound ricocheting off the walls and crawling beneath my skin.
"You think you are funny."
"If you believe it is such a mess now," I said, "then clean it up. You are good at that. You said it yourself, did you not? We are bound forever in more ways than blood. Is that not right, brother? Cover for me this time around."
His jaw tightened.
"You will pay dearly for this," he said.
"You have done your worst to me several times already." I held his gaze without flinching. "And I have lived through every single one of them. I will live through this, too."
He opened his mouth, something else clearly building behind his teeth, when his phone chimed sharply from his pocket. He glanced at it, his expression flickering with irritation at the interruption.
"I am not finished with you," he said, pocketing the phone. "We will speak again. Intimately, Isa."
He used the name deliberately, one final cut before he turned and walked out, the door slamming hard enough to rattle the same picture frame a second time.
I stood there for a long moment after he left.
Only as the adrenaline ebbed did I realize my body had been trembling all along. My hands shook when I finally looked at them. My legs felt far away, numb and foreign, like limbs held too rigid for too long.
I forced myself to move.
I crossed to the dresser where my phone waited, the device he had bugged without my knowledge, quietly betraying every private word I had shared with Shanelle straight into his hands for who knew how long. My fingers fumbled as I picked it up, clumsy and unwilling.
I carried it into the bathroom.
I turned the tub’s valve and let the water run, and once it had pooled deep enough, I dropped the phone into it without hesitation, watching the screen flicker once before going dark entirely beneath the surface.
I sat on the edge of the tub and watched the water continue to rise around the dead device, my own breathing slowly evening out as the immediate danger passed.
He had sold him.
The thought crept in late, slipping past the adrenaline, the fear, and the ache where his hand had been, settling into an older, deeper wound he had reopened with such ease. Étienne. The boy Margaux had loved before either of them understood the price of love. Lucian had not just orchestrated his family’s destruction. He had arranged what followed, delivering a child to those who specialized in ruin, and called it mercy, as if killing him outright would have been less cruel than what he chose instead.
I had plenty of parts to play in that. Plenty. But I refused to linger on that sick gnawing feeling. It was in the past. No use crying over spilt milk.
I pressed my hand against my mouth and let the water keep rising.