Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

I spoke the words and steeled myself for whatever might come next.

What arrived was not pain, not quite. It was the uncanny feeling of sliding aside within myself, as if someone else had quietly slipped into the driver’s seat, guiding my body while I drifted to a distant, hushed corner. I could still sense everything—see through my eyes, hear through my ears—but the controls were no longer mine. And the presence now steering me felt utterly unlike the Theodore I had known before.

This presence was softer. Worn down by time.

Dorian stared at me.

Whatever he had anticipated when I spoke, whatever gentle refusal he had readied, it never came. Instead, he studied my face with the intensity of someone searching for an impossible truth and discovering it staring back at him.

My mouth opened.

"Hello, Father."

The voice that emerged sounded like mine in tone and pitch, but everything else was off. The cadence stumbled, the rhythm unfamiliar, the words settling strangely in the air. The head healer edged back, pressing himself against the wall.

Dorian did not move at all. It looked like he had prepared to call me crazy and do worse. But the cadence that came out of me had stopped him right in his tracks, and even his mind had mildly short-circuited.

"That is not—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "That is not possible."

"You said that when I told you about Laurent too," my mouth said, in Theodore’s voice wearing my intonation. "You said it was not possible that I could feel that way about someone. That it was a phase. That you were going to find me a good woman from an influential family and I would understand eventually."

Dorian’s composure fractured.

Not in a single, clean break—but with a gradual, dreadful splintering, as if ancient stone were yielding at last beneath the weight of everything it had held up for so long.

"Theodore," he said.

"I do not have much time," my mouth said. "So I need you to listen more than you talk, which has always been difficult for you, but I am asking you to try."

Dorian sank onto the edge of his bed, and for the first time since I entered, he looked not like an Alpha, but simply an old man—diminished, his shoulders hunched, his hands knotted in his lap.

"I am listening," he said.

"You put a stranger in the space I left," Theodore said through me. "Because you would not sit with the fact that the space existed because of you. You could not tolerate the silence of it, so you found something to fill it with, and you convinced yourself that was grief when it was really just avoidance wearing grief’s face."

Dorian opened his mouth.

"I am not finished."

He closed it.

"The way you raised us has chained us to this moment. I am gone—dead—and Céline, she’s spent her whole life twisting herself into something unrecognizable, believing she had to become monstrous just to earn what you should have given freely, or at least tried to."

The voice spilling from me trembled—not with anger, but with the bone-deep weariness of someone hollowed out by grief and truth too long unspoken. The exhaustion was almost physical, as if the words themselves scraped raw on the way out. "You smothered me beneath the weight of your hopes, your dreams, your endless blueprints for who I was meant to be. You made me believe that love was conditional, that I had to contort myself into your vision of a son, your perfect legacy. And Céline—Goddess, you broke her in the opposite way. You carved her up with silence, with all the things you never said but made her feel: that she would never be enough, never fit the mold you needed, no matter how she bled for you."

Dorian’s eyes were wet.

"Did she do it?" His voice came out barely above a whisper. "Was she the reason? Did Céline—"

"She poisoned my mind. She probably was the deciding factor of why I did it." A pause. "But you had been poisoning me for years before she got there. She found a wound you had already made, and she put something in it. That is not a defense of her. But it is the truth." The voice steadied. "You have just as much hand in this as she did."

"I am sorry." The words left him like something that had been held too long in a fist. "My boy. What did I do to my boy?"

"You did what you knew how to do," Theodore said through me, and I felt something in the voice that was not quite forgiveness but was not anger either. Something more complicated and more honest than either. "That does not make it right. It just means it was not entirely malicious. You could not give what you did not have."

Dorian stood, and before I could register the motion, his arms came around me.

I lingered within the borrowed space of my own body, feeling an old man cling to what he thought was the last fragment of his son. His grief was so immense, so raw, that even from my distant vantage point inside myself, it swept through me.

"If I were still alive," Theodore said against his father’s shoulder, "you would not have changed. I want you to know that I know that. You would have kept trying to fix me, kept believing that love meant bending someone into the shape you needed them to be. You would have tried to love me in the only language you knew, and it still would have been wrong."

Dorian pulled back, holding my face in his hands, looking at eyes that were mine but carrying someone else.

"Then what do I do now?" he said.

"You do better. With the time you have left." Theodore’s voice was quiet. "With my sister and even with the boy you brought to replace me. You need to stop letting his position be punishment. You stop treating your second son like a replacement. He came here carrying his own grief and his own history, and you have been making it worse. Do better with him. Properly this time. Not because it absolves you of anything, but because he is here and he deserves something better than what you gave me if you are going to replace me."

"I will let him go," Dorian said, nodding, the words coming out with the weight of a man making a decision. "Free him from this. Return the position—"

"No." The word came sharp through my mouth. "No, Father. That is not what I want."

Dorian blinked. "I thought—"

"How could that be what I want? You have given yourself a second son, a second chance, and your instinct is still to discard him?" The voice carrying through me was genuinely baffled. "He did not ask for any of this. He has been trying to survive inside a life that should never have been his. Give him the life properly. Let it be his. That is not a punishment for me. That is you finally doing something right."

Dorian stared at me, at Theodore, at the two of us occupying the same space.

"And Céline," Theodore continued. "She deserves consequences for what she has done. I am not asking you to forgive her easily. But you played your part in making her what she is. You made her believe the only path to acknowledgment was through power she had to take rather than be given. That is yours to carry and yours to address. Not to erase, because you cannot erase it, but to address honestly."

"I did not know," Dorian said.

"You did not want to know," Theodore said. "There is a difference."

Silence settled between them, the kind that came after something that needed to be said had finally been said, and both people on either side of it were still processing what that meant for everything that came after.

"Have you been here this whole time?" Dorian’s voice had gone very small. "Lingering? All this time?"

"It ends now," Theodore said.

The smile that curved my lips was not my own. I sensed its shape from within—gentle, weary, and at last, utterly quiet.

"Goodbye, Father."

And then the presence lifted.

It departed cleanly, without fanfare, like water wrung from a cloth. Suddenly, I was back in control, blinking, acutely aware of the heaviness of my limbs, the room’s temperature, and the sound of Dorian’s breath.

Theodore stood at my side, his form altered—lighter now, less defined, as if he were already fading.

"Thank you," he said.

"You deserved to rest," I said. My voice came out rough. "A long time ago."

"Tell Laurent I said hello." He smiled, and it was the smile of someone setting something down they had been carrying past the point of endurance. "Tell him I am glad he has forgiven himself, and when I cross over, I will keep watching, hoping he stays happy."

Then he was gone.

Dorian’s hand shot out and grabbed my arm.

"Do not go yet," he said, his voice cracking entirely. "Theo—"

"He is already gone," I said softly.

Dorian’s legs gave way.

He sank down slowly, not collapsing but folding in on himself, settling on the bedroom floor with his hands covering his face. The sound he made was beyond words.

I stood there and let him have it.