Chapter 106: Pity party
VIVIANNE
The letter opener was small and silver, a silent fixture on my dresser for years, never carrying any meaning until now.
I picked it up and studied it, watching my reflection warp across the blade—stretched thin, unfamiliar, a stranger’s face staring back.
I pressed the blade to the back of my hand, feeling the cold metal bite against my skin.
The cut was shallow, just as I intended. My healing factor had always lagged behind, the one place my Omega blood whispered its presence beneath the life I’d constructed. A deeper wound would linger, invite questions I could never answer about a Luna’s slow recovery. So I let it bleed, crimson threading across my knuckles and down my wrist, looking far worse than it truly was.
Amara lay on the floor where Lucian had left her.
I looked at her and felt my chest collapse inward, as if something essential had been hollowed out.
She had believed I could fix it. That faith—the kind people lower on the ladder offer to those near power, built on hope rather than proof—had always felt undeserved. Tonight, I had failed her in the most undeniable way.
I pressed my bleeding hand to the wall and let my mouth fall open.
The scream tore out of me, louder than I expected—raw, cracked, and painfully real. The grief beneath it was true, even if the story I was about to spin around it was not.
Footsteps thundered closer, then pounding. The door burst open, and two sentinels surged in, hands raised, eyes scanning with the sharp reflexes of men trained for danger. But the threat they found was horizontal and still, ringed by blood already cooling at the edges.
They stopped.
The taller one’s gaze moved from Amara to me and back again. His hand lowered incrementally.
The second sentinel crouched near the body and pulled aside the fabric at her skin. He stared for a moment at the scarification Lucian had burned into her skin, and his expression shifted into something I recognized. Certainty replacing confusion. A shape that fit the story he already knew.
"Alliance Against Rank," he said.
The words dropped into the room like stones sinking in water.
The head sentinel straightened. His jaw had gone tight. He looked at me, at my bleeding hand, and something in his posture changed. The assessment he was running was visible on his face if you knew what to look for.
He moved toward me. "Luna, we need to—"
"Where were you?" The question came out cold and flat, and the effect was immediate. Both of them went still. "Where were you when I had to handle this myself?"
The silence that followed was thick with the knowledge of failure, the kind that settles over men who know they have fallen short.
"We apologize, Luna Vivianne. This is shocking."
"You were not the one who was trapped in the room with her." I kept my voice measured even though my hand was throbbing and the smell of blood was everywhere. "I cannot believe this. She has been with this family for years. She was my own personal Omega... and I did not notice anything strange until today."
"I apologize for my incompetence. But how did you figure out she was a rogue and what happened?" the sentinel asked.
I turned to give him a glare. He had to feel at fault. He could not be given a second to think rationally. "Is it not clear? I noticed the brand while she was attending to me. When I asked about it, she went berserk and tried to kill me. She lost."
I offered no further explanation. The story assembled itself from the facts before them, and people nearly always preferred a version that spared them the effort of imagination.
"Get the healers," the head sentinel said.
"I’ll fucking heal," I said immediately.
"Luna—"
"I said I will fucking heal! What I want... is for you guys to get her out of here." My eyes went to Amara’s body, and whatever showed on my face in that moment was not entirely performance. "Please. Just get her out of my room."
They moved quickly. One slipped into the hallway to call for backup, while the other stationed himself by the door, radiating the tense alertness of someone desperate to make up for failure. I sat on the edge of my bed, cradling my bleeding hand, and waited.
Armand arrived before the additional sentinels did.
He entered mid-sentence, voice edged with fury, searching for a target. But when he saw me, his anger folded inward, transforming into something quieter, reserved for what he truly cared about.
"How." He crossed the room and took my hand in both of his, turning it over with a thoroughness that would have been gentle if his jaw weren’t clenched so hard. He looked up at the sentinel by the door. "How does a rogue get into my wife’s room? Explain that to me. Right now."
The sentinel attempted to answer, but I spoke first.
"I had no idea." The words came out quiet and tired, because I was tired, and tired was close enough to the truth that it didn’t require any construction at all. "She was my favorite Omega, and she has been here for so long, and I had no fucking idea! How could Amara of all people... be a rogue? She was doing something for me when I noticed it. The mark of the alliance against rank."
"She attacked you the second you noticed?"
"She moved before I could call out." I looked at my hand. "I reacted."
Armand studied me for a long moment, his gaze skimming over me like a man searching a document for the one line that would explain everything. I had long ago mastered the art of appearing unremarkable beneath that scrutiny.
"Get the healer," he said to the sentinel.
"I said I’ll heal."
"You’re bleeding on my bed."
I glanced down. He was right. I shifted, accomplishing nothing, and he made a low sound in his throat before repeating his order to the sentinel, patience thinning.
They led me to the ground-floor infirmary, where the air was thick with antiseptic and fresh linen. The healer on duty was a small, quiet man who moved with the practiced efficiency of someone used to evening emergencies. He gestured to the examination table, and I sat, watching his hands as he worked.
He produced a cloth and began to clean the wound. I tracked every movement from the corner of my eye, following the cloth from my skin to the basin, then to the bin on his left, where he dropped it without ceremony or interest.
I let out a quiet breath through my nose.
He reached for something else, but I stopped him before his hand could touch the collection kit on the shelf above the basin.
"I’m not a pussy." The words came out direct and unapologetic. "Just finish cleaning me up and let me go back upstairs."
He paused and looked at me.
"Luna, it’s standard procedure to test for poi—"
"I know what it’s standard for." I met his eyes and kept my expression pleasant in the way that communicated something other than pleasantness. "I watched her go down with my own hands. She didn’t get anything in this wound. Just fucking clean it."
The truth was, I was scared. I was scared shitless that somehow, this would reveal something about me. What I had done was take a risk for my psychotic brother, and I did not want to put myself in harm’s way, selling this sick tale.
The healer obeyed, and he cleaned it.
Armand stood by the door, arms crossed. When the healer finished, he sat beside me. His posture shifted. I watched his anger compress into something resembling guilt. It was a sight rare enough that it caught my attention.
"I’m sorry I wasn’t there," he said.
His words landed somewhere strange. I stared at my bandaged hand and thought of all the times he hadn’t been there, the long list of absences that shaped the life he shared with his true wife. He had not even been to her funeral. So what would he know about ’not being there’?
There had to be grace in me somewhere, I guess. Since we played him like a fool. How could he know? Lucian loved his games.
"It doesn’t matter," I said.
He was silent for a moment. Then, needing to turn discomfort into action, he said, "The Alliance Against Rank. Here. In our own house. My pack."
"I cannot say I am surprised." I kept my voice steady. "What happened with Valcourt and Margaux shook people. It emboldened them. When a pack like ours shows a crack, certain groups press on it to see how far it will split."
He made a low sound, equal parts agreement and simmering fury.
"Which is why we cannot wait on the Texier matter." I turned to face him. "We have to project strength. A marriage alliance shows Beaumont is not diminished. That we are still choosing our alliances, not having them forced upon us."
"You’re right." He leaned back against the wall. "I’ll bring it up at dinner again. Bastien cannot be stubborn for too long. As a man, he should recognize his responsibility. If he does not—"
"No." The word came out with enough quiet authority that he stopped. "Don’t make the dinner table a war zone. I am very close to getting him to let down his walls, and your spitfire approach to things will only cause Bastien to resist." I paused. "What you can do is send the marriage proposal directly to Pack Texier. Make it a thing that has already been set in motion before Bastien has the chance to perform more resistance."
Armand considered that for a moment.
"Trust me, I have him handled," I said.
He looked at me for a long time. Whatever he was looking for, something about my face must have satisfied it, because he nodded once with the clean decisiveness of a man who had just made a decision he planned to stick to.
"I trust you," he said.
His words settled over me with a weight he never meant. I stared at my wrapped hand, the clean white linen hiding the lie I had carved to protect an almost decade-old deception, and thought of Amara’s eyes going still beneath my hands.
I thought of the Omegas in this pack who would wake tomorrow to the news that one of their own had been branded a rogue, a traitor, an assassin. I imagined the silent suspicion curling around them in the days ahead—the extra scrutiny, the trust pulled back, the sharp loneliness of being watched by those meant to be your own.
I had done that. Not Lucian, not Armand, not the system. Me, in the brief span it took to weave a story around a body.
"I trust you," Armand said again, softer, like he thought I hadn’t heard him.
I looked up and offered him the smile he needed to see.
"Good," I said.