Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

He turned to face me fully. The kitchen light caught the mask, and though it hid his expression well enough, I could tell that he looked at me with suspicion.

"You want honesty," he said.

"Yes."

"Does Chris love you?"

I blinked. "That is not what we are talking about."

"I am making it what we are talking about." His voice was very level. "Does he love you?"

"Chris is my friend."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer I have for you."

"Because you will not say it." He stepped closer, not aggressively, just closing the distance until I had to tilt my head slightly to hold his gaze. "He came here for you. He walked into a Valcourt cell for you. He sat at that table tonight and nearly got himself killed for you. That is not friendship. That is a man in love, and you know it."

"People do things for friends."

"Not like that." His jaw tightened briefly. "Not the way he looked at you when you got on your knees for him."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"Even if that were true," I said carefully, "it would have nothing to do with what I just asked you."

"It has everything to do with it." His voice was level, but the bond was not. Something had started moving through it, low and steady and hot, the particular frequency I had learned to recognize as the feeling he refused to put into words. "You want an answer from me so you know whether you can go back to him."

I stared at him.

"That is insane," I said.

"Is it?"

Yes, it was. Where had that even come from? What did any of that have to do with what I had asked?

"Yes." I turned to face him fully. "Étienne, listen to what you are saying. You think I am standing in your kitchen asking whether you love your fiancée so I can run to Chris?" I watched his face. "I have not been in a relationship since I was sixteen years old. Since you. I have not let anyone close enough for it to become a question. Not once."

Something shifted in his expression.

"And the way you are talking, and how badly you are fixated on Chris... it sounds almost like you are..."

Then it sort of clicked.

"Goddess... You are jealous," I said.

"I did not say that."

"You did not have to." I watched his face. "Étienne. You just asked me about Chris instead of answering a question about Séverine."

He said nothing.

The oven ticked quietly behind us, holding its heat, waiting for the Wellington. The kitchen was saturated with the scent of pastry, butter, and the lingering warmth of what we had made together. Étienne stood in front of me, silent on the subject of the woman he was supposed to love. I thought of the purple thread binding him to her, the red one connecting him to me, and how he had never released my hand in the infirmary corridor, while I was unconscious, even when he could have.

"She is going to want your answer," I said finally. "Whatever it is, she deserves to hear it from you."

"I know that," he said quietly.

"Then you should probably figure out what it is."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he lifted the Wellington and slid it into the oven. We lapsed into a silence heavy with everything we had not said.

Then, he broke that silence.

"Séverine and I are similar in ways that matter," he said. "She understands things about me that most people would not understand. What I survived. What it did to me." He paused. "And I care about her. That part is true."

I waited.

"But when I thought you were drowning," he said, "I did not think about Séverine."

The words fell quietly between us, stripped of drama, which only made them strike deeper than any outburst could have.

"I did not think about anything except getting to you," he said. " One time can be a coincidence. But two... And I have been trying to explain that away since it happened. But... there is no rational explanation for it."

I looked at him.

He looked back at me, and neither of us moved. The silence between us felt like something that had been growing for years and had finally reached its limit.

"Étienne," I said quietly.

"I know." His voice came out rough at the edges. "I know I should not want this. I know every reason it is wrong, and I have recited all of them to myself, more than once, more than I can count." He exhaled slowly. "And it does not change anything."

He reached up.

His hands found the edges of the mask, and he pulled it off in one motion, setting it on the counter without a glance. His face was bare in the kitchen light, scarred and unscarred sides equally revealed, and he looked at me with the openness of someone who had stopped calculating.

"It is all I want right now," he said. "I know that I should not. And yet, it is still all I want."

He closed the distance between us.

His mouth found mine, and the kiss was nothing like the one at the altar, which had been all performance and politics and the start of something neither of us had chosen in good faith. This was true and intentional. His hand cupped my face, and he kissed me the way people do when they have stopped pretending they do not want to, and I felt it move through the bond like light through water, warm and complete and free of the usual walls between us.

I let him.

My hands gripped the front of his shirt, and I kissed him back with years of grief and guilt and the aching hope of someone who had spent ages standing outside a door they had closed, wondering if it would ever open again.

It opened.

He pulled back just enough to look at me, his forehead almost touching mine, his breath uneven in a way that matched mine exactly.

Neither of us said anything as the oven ticked mindlessly like my heart was doing right now.

I looked up at his face, at the scars and the dark eyes and the expression he was wearing that I had never seen him wear before.