Claimed by the scarred Alpha

CHRIS

The Beta of this infuriating pack—Laurent, if I remembered right—gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher as he announced it was late and offered to show us to our rooms. I trailed after him down the corridor, moving with the hollow detachment of someone whose body kept going while the rest of them had quietly shut down.

I had done nothing useful tonight.

That thought kept circling back, no matter how many times I tried to shove it away. I had stormed into Valcourt territory with eight sentinels and a head full of righteous anger, only to achieve nothing but my own imprisonment, Margaux kneeling on a cold dining room floor, and nearly igniting a war over a beef wellington. That was my grand total: making everything worse, then sitting helplessly as Margaux bore the fallout of my actions with a grace I had never earned.

The guilt pressed against me, thick and suffocating, equal parts weight and shame.

Shanelle walked at my side, her glances brushing over me like gentle questions I had no answers for. I had nothing left to give her, not even the effort of speech. When Laurent stopped outside a room on the left, she nudged my arm, a silent reminder to keep moving.

"Thank you," I said.

My words landed flat, duller than I meant. Laurent took them in stride, saying nothing.

He led Shanelle to her room first, just one door down from mine. I watched as a sentinel stationed himself outside her door, the gesture so pointed it was almost theatrical.

"Is that how guests are treated here?" I asked.

Laurent turned to face me with the expression of someone who had been anticipating the question. "Beaumont and Valcourt have a complicated history. It would be foolish not to take precautions." He clasped his hands in front of him. "I am on the side of peace between these packs. Shaky as that peace is right now. I intend to make sure it holds." He held my gaze. "Alpha Dorian humiliated your Luna tonight. A wolf you were biologically built to protect. I would not blame you for thinking about doing something about that. I would feel the same... I feel the same."

I looked at the sentinel.

Then at Laurent.

So I turned and went to my room because the only other option was to say something reckless enough to get myself locked up again.

"Well... Goodnight then."

But my sentinel appeared outside my door before Laurent had even finished his goodnight. It did not help that the Beta had delivered it with the practiced calm of someone used to handling troublesome guests, every move part of a well-worn routine.

"I cannot say the same," I said. "But I mean no offense."

"None taken."

"If I wanted to move around the pack tonight," I said, "could I?"

Laurent smiled. The expression was warm and completely unyielding. "Of course. The sentinels answer to me, so I would know your movements in real time. If you have nothing to hide, there is no problem." He paused. "I would advise avoiding Luna Margaux at this hour." A brief pause that he used very deliberately burned through. "She will be in Alpha Theodore’s room by now."

My grip on the door frame tightened, knuckles whitening with the effort to stay composed.

"Thank you for that information," I said, and closed the door.

I stood frozen in the center of the room, motionless for a long moment.

Alpha Theodore’s room??? I did not miss the implication of those words. And to think the Beta was talking about peace-making.

Peace-making my ass!

I perched on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor, trying to herd my thoughts into order. It was impossible. Every problem in my head jostled for space, none willing to wait their turn.

The witch had told me who Theodore Valcourt actually was. Étienne Archambault. The dead boy from the dead family. The name Margaux had carried like a wound for eight years, the one she never talked about directly, but that lived in the careful avoidance of certain conversations and the particular expression she wore sometimes when she thought no one was paying attention.

At dinner, the truth had burned behind my teeth, desperate to escape. I had opened my mouth, ready to let it spill out.

And then something had happened.

It was not a decision or a choice. It was something physical—a sudden tightening in my chest that stole my breath for five full seconds, long enough for Shanelle to notice and touch my arm. By the time I could breathe again, the moment was gone, and so was my resolve.

The witch had not been bluffing.

Whatever she had left in me with that touch in the cell, it lingered. Sometimes I felt it at the edges of my awareness—not pain, exactly, but like a door that refused to budge no matter how hard I pushed.

I replayed the old Alpha calling Theodore his son at dinner. Maybe he was senile, maybe he was playing a game I could not decipher, or maybe both. The young Alpha’s face had flickered at those words, a flash of pain before he masked it. He did not look like someone accepting a title he had not earned. He looked like someone being forced to remember an old wound.

Margaux had defended him all night—not out of duty, not with the hollow conviction she reserved for obligations, but with the quiet fierceness she saved for things she truly cared about.

I pressed my palms against my eyes.

The problem was so clear I could barely stand to face it. Margaux had carried guilt for that boy since I first met her at sixteen. Guilt like that hardens over time, settling into the bedrock of who you are. It does not vanish just because the person who caused it returns. It mutates, becoming something knotted and far more dangerous.

She was not going to leave voluntarily.

I had known it before she said it in the dining room, but hearing her admit it made it impossible to ignore. She was not trapped here. She was choosing to stay, for reasons she had not shared and maybe had not even admitted to herself.

Which meant that if I wanted to be useful, I needed real information—the kind you could not get from a cell or a dinner table where powerful men dictated the rules.

The witch had given me answers, but she had also left something in me that kept those answers locked away at the wrong moment. She was not fully on my side, but not against me either. She had her own agenda, and for now, it overlapped just enough with mine for her to reach out.

Her chair at dinner had been empty.

Which meant she was somewhere in this estate, moving through it unobserved.

I lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. My body was spent, exhausted down to the marrow after too much adrenaline and too little rest. My mind, though, refused to quiet.

Margaux’s face surfaced in the darkness behind my eyes, just as it always did when I let my guard slip. The version of her that lived in my chest was persistent, familiar, and endlessly inconvenient.

My hands moved without my permission. Down to where my crotch was.

I stopped them and immediately sat up. I was better than this.

I pressed the heels of my hands to my forehead and breathed slowly through my nose until the ache of wanting dulled into something I could control.

There was no universe where that was acceptable.

I needed to think. I needed to find someone with answers I did not have, and motives I could at least guess at. The only person who fit that description was the witch who had done something to me in a dungeon and skipped dinner.

I crossed to the door and pulled it open.

The sentinel turned immediately.

"I want to find someone," I said.

He looked at me with the attentiveness of his position.

"Where can I find Luna Séverine?"