Chapter 100: Battlelines
MARGAUX
When we arrived, the dining room was already alive with presence.
Alpha Dorian sat at the head of the table with the settled authority of a man who had spent so long at the top of rooms that his body had stopped knowing how to occupy space any other way. Everything about him was deliberate. The placement of his hands. The angle of his shoulders. Even the way he held his glass communicated that he was not someone who waited for things to come to him.
Céline sat to his right. She looked up when we walked in, and whatever passed through her expression moved too quickly for me to catch before it was gone.
We scattered ourselves around the table with the awkwardness of actors missing their cues. Étienne claimed the seat closest to his supposed new father, Laurent, beside him. I landed across from Céline, Shanelle to my left, Chris just beyond her—a seating chart that felt like setting a match beside tinder and hoping nothing caught.
Servants glided in, laying out food with a practiced, silent grace.
For about four minutes, the table pretended at normalcy.
"Theodore."
Dorian set his glass down without looking at it. The name landed in the room with the weight of a summons.
"I sent word this morning that I wanted to see you." His eyes stayed on Étienne with the unhurried certainty of someone accustomed to having his expectations met. "I received no response."
"I received your message." Étienne reached for his fork. "I was otherwise engaged."
"With what, precisely?"
"There was an incident on the grounds." He kept his voice level, offering just enough to answer the question without answering it fully. "It demanded my personal attention."
Dorian’s gaze swept the table and landed on me with the precision of someone who had already filed me away before dinner began. He looked at me like a forecast come true, and resented being proven right.
"Ah... The Beaumont girl." He reached for his wine. "I hope you are not letting her monopolize your time, Theodore. A man who abandons his responsibilities every time his wife has a difficult afternoon is not a man this pack will respect."
Shanelle’s hand closed around Chris’s forearm under the table. I caught the motion from the corner of my eye and did not look at either of them.
"It was considerably more than a difficult afternoon," Étienne said.
"She is sitting at my table breathing," Dorian said, with the tone of a man closing an argument. "I would call that a satisfactory outcome."
The rage slammed into me through the bond before Étienne’s face betrayed a flicker. It was hot, urgent, battering the walls he’d built at a cost I could feel. His expression stayed still, his hands steady, slicing his food with the same careful precision.
I looked away from him and noticed the empty chair.
Séverine’s chair stood empty. The place was set, but the person missing, her absence a shape I could feel even as I wished I couldn’t.
I returned to my plate.
"We have not been formally introduced."
I looked up. Dorian was addressing me now with the magnanimous air of someone conferring a small honor.
"No," I said. "We have not."
"I trust the transition has not overwhelmed you." He folded his hands in front of him. "A Luna’s place in a pack of this standing is not a complicated thing, but it does require a certain understanding of one’s function." He let a pause develop before he continued. "Your primary purpose is to support your husband. To stand behind him and help him grow into the leader this pack needs. A good Luna does not place herself above her role." He paused again and then added, with the ease of someone sharing common sense: "The kitchen is also not exclusively the domain of Omegas. I would encourage you to remember that."
The silence that followed lasted exactly two seconds.
"What the absolute fuck?"
Shanelle didn’t bother to raise her voice. She didn’t have to. The sharpness of her words cut through the room all the same.
Dorian turned toward her with the slow, deliberate attention of a man who had not been spoken to that way in a very long time and was recalibrating.
"Who are these people?" he asked Céline, as if Shanelle and Chris had simultaneously ceased to exist as individuals worth acknowledging.
"Guests." Céline reached for her wine with perfect composure, the kind that was its own form of dismissal. "Allies from Beaumont. So perhaps we could keep things civil and get through a single meal without it becoming a referendum on whether women are people."
Dorian looked at her.
"And you think that gives you standing to correct me?"
"I think it gives me standing to point out the obvious." She took a sip. "But feel free to disagree."
"Even to your own daughter." Shanelle’s voice had climbed. "You absolute sexis—"
"Watch your tone!" Étienne’s voice came across the table without heat and without volume, which made it considerably more effective than either would have been. It landed, and it stayed.
Shanelle stared at him, her face registering the disbelief of someone who had stepped into a familiar room and found a stranger waiting there instead.
His shields were still fully raised. The bond carried nothing through, and his face offered me nothing more than it offered anyone else at the table. I had no way of knowing what was happening behind it.
I set my fork down.
"I understand my role." I looked at Dorian steadily and kept my voice measured. "I take it seriously. But my role is Luna, not servant, and there is a difference worth acknowledging." I held his gaze without looking away. "The Omegas behind this table are not lesser contributors to how this pack functions, either. They are the reason it functions. That is not an opinion that belongs only to Beaumont. It is simply true."
Dorian regarded me for a moment with something that sat between assessment and amusement.
"You remind me of my girl over there." He tilted his head toward Céline, not unkindly. "She has the same habit of speaking as though her thoughts are facts." He leaned back in his chair. "You will find, given enough time in this pack, that Valcourt does not tend to reward that quality in its women. I certainly never have."
"It is fortunate for me then, Father-in-law," I said, "that I am not your wife."
Something moved through his expression. The amusement sharpened for a moment, and then he laughed. A short, unperformed sound that surprised even him, it seemed, because he recovered from it quickly.
"Keep that up," he said, settling back, "and Séverine will outpace you before you find your footing. She learned a long time ago how this house works."
Shanelle turned to look at me.
The look on her face was a question she was not going to ask quietly, and I could see the same question forming on Chris’s face beside her, the two of them connecting the same dots at the same speed.
"What does that mean?" Shanelle asked, low and pointed, directing it at me specifically.
"Eat your food," I said.
"I will tell you what it means." Dorian seemed pleased to have generated this particular reaction. His voice carried the satisfaction of a man who had found the pressure point and intended to use it. "Séverine is my son’s fiancée. His intended second wife. She understands the order of things in this house, and she conducts herself accordingly." He looked between Shanelle and Chris with the benign condescension of someone explaining something to people who were not quite equipped to understand it. "A conquest bride who arrives here with opinions and a spine is a charming novelty. But novelty has a shelf life. I would advise your friend to remember which position she actually occupies before she mistakes my son’s patience for equality."
Chris stood up.
The chair went back hard and fast, and he was on his feet before the sound of it finished moving through the room. His face had gone past anger into something quieter and more absolute, the specific expression of a person who had weighed the consequences and decided they were acceptable.
"Say that again," he said.
Dorian looked up at him with the unhurried attention of someone who had genuinely not been threatened in so long that the shape of it had become unfamiliar.
"And now the other one raises his voice at me at my own table." His tone had not changed. Not even slightly. "Do you have a death wish, boy?"
"No." Chris’s voice was very level. "Do you? You look like you are about one more sentence away from finding out."
"Shut it."
Étienne was on his feet.
"One more word," he said, looking directly at Chris, "and I will find enough charges to keep you in a Valcourt cell until you are considerably less confident. How you are conducting yourself on this ground right now is an insult to every courtesy that has been extended to you today."
Chris looked at him. His jaw worked once. He was not going to let it go. I had known that face for years, and the face was telling me he had already decided.
"Shut the fuck up," he said, and every word was deliberate. "You absolute monster. Do you think I remotely give a rat ass about this..."
I stood up.
"How dare you?" The words came out of me before anything else could, and they came out with an authority I did not know I was going to use until it was already in the air. I looked at Chris directly. "How dare you raise your voice at my husband. And at my father-in-law, in his own house, at his own table." I held his gaze and did not flinch from the look on his face. "Have you forgotten your place, Beta?"
The table went completely quiet.
Chris stared at me.
Shock flashed across his face, raw and unhidden, hurt following close behind before he buried it. I saw both before his mask returned, and I hated what I’d done. I hated every second of it. I looked away before I could undo it, fixing my gaze on Céline because I needed somewhere safe to land.
Then I realized how wrong that idea had been because Theodore stood behind her.
Not fully solid. Not the way living people were solid. But there, unmistakably, in the space just behind her left shoulder, watching the table with an expression I could not read at this distance.
My eyes moved before I could stop them, tracking to Alpha Dorian’s chair almost involuntarily.
Another figure stood behind him.
The shocking part was that it was also Theodore.
What the fuck was happening?