Chapter 92: Daughter Daughter
VIVIANNE
Shanelle tried the call twice.
Both times it rang out.
She lowered the phone and gave me that look that made my stomach turn because it was the same thing I was thinking too, and the thought tasted bitter on my tongue.
"She is not picking up."
I stood very still.
The file waited on my dresser, its battered brown cover staring back at me. I gazed at it again, but my mind wandered far away. Margaux ignoring my calls was something I had braced myself for. I had rehearsed the story: she was angry, and angry daughters shut out their mothers. It hurt, but it was a pain I knew how to live with.
But Margaux not answering Shanelle was another matter entirely.
"She was not avoiding my calls then," I said.
It came out quieter than I intended.
Shanelle said nothing.
I turned the thought over. If she was not avoiding calls, then she could not take them. And if she could not take them, something was preventing her from doing so. Something or someone.
"Could he be abusive?"
The question escaped before I could catch it, and as I heard my own voice, raw with doubt, something hollow and sour twisted inside me. I laughed—a sharp, empty sound, stripped of any real humor.
Could he be abusive?
I had given my daughter to a man I had never met, a man whose face was a rumor, who threatened war and lingered at our borders like a predator waiting for the perfect moment. I had stood in that dressing room, fastening her into a red dress that screamed conquest to anyone watching. I told her to survive it, just as I had survived. And now, in my own bedroom, I was asking myself if the man I delivered her to might be the one to break her.
The laugh faded and left something worse behind it.
I looked back at the file one more time.
There was something uncanny about its pull. For seven years, I had avoided that file, never wanting to touch it. But now, with it so close, my eyes kept drifting back. Some part of me circled it like an old wound—not to reopen it, but because the ache of the scar had never faded.
Maybe it would be better if it disappeared.
The thought came, and I let it linger. If those files ended up in Valcourt and were used however the Alpha wished, they would no longer be my burden. The record would slip from my grasp, and any reckoning would fall elsewhere.
But the gnawing did not stop.
It settled deep in my gut and would not be soothed. I knew this feeling; it was the weight of an unconfessed sin. Not the kind that shouts, but the kind that lives in your bones, in the clench of your jaw, in the half-breaths you take when you have forgotten how to breathe deeply.
I was still standing there holding the edges of that thought when Shanelle sucked in a sharp breath.
"Oh, my goddess." She looked down at her phone, her eyes wide. "Chris is calling."
I straightened.
"It must be because I have not gone yet," she said, her voice pitching upward. "He is probably being threatened into demanding to know where I am. What do I say? What do I—"
"Shanelle." I crossed the distance between us and put one hand briefly on her shoulder, firm and steady. "Calm down and pick up the phone."
She exhaled once, hard, and then answered.
She put it on the loudspeaker before the first word came through, and we both went still.
"Shanelle."
It was Margaux’s voice.
Not Chris’s. Margaux’s, coming through the small speaker with that particular quality it got when she was working to sound composed, and the effort showed only at the edges. I felt something crack open behind my ribs and held it together by sheer force of habit.
Shanelle’s composure slipped for just a moment. Her hand tightened around the phone, and her eyes went bright before she pulled herself back.
"Did something happen to Chris?" she asked.
"Of course not." A pause, brief but weighted. "I am trying to make sure that does not happen." Another pause followed. "It is getting late, Shanelle. Just get those files so Chris and the sentinels can be released. Or is something wrong?"
Shanelle turned to look at me.
I looked back at her.
My mind left the room entirely. I pictured Margaux somewhere cold and strange, told to keep calm, to smile, to perform, to bargain while bruises bloomed and faded beneath her clothes. I saw the daughter I had sent into that pack in a red dress—my doing—sitting on the other end of the line, telling her best friend she was fine in that voice she used when the truth was too costly to admit.
I shut my eyes.
I opened them.
"Hello? Shanelle?"
Shanelle blinked and pulled herself together. "Yeah. Sorry." She smoothed her voice out with visible effort. "No. Nothing is wrong. I even just got access to it. I am trying not to bring attention to myself by rushing out."
"Oh... Okay. Be safe."
I raised my hand.
Shanelle looked at me with a question in her eyes and pressed her palm over the speaker.
"Luna Vivianne?" she whispered.
"Ask her why he wants it." My voice came out low. "I need to know something."
"What do you mean?"
"I need to know if she is being threatened." I kept my voice steady, even though nothing inside me felt steady. "I need to know if delivering those files is the condition for her suffering to stop, not just for Chris." I looked at Shanelle directly. "You don’t think she would—"
"This is Valcourt," I said before she could finish. "Ask."
Shanelle removed her hand from the speaker.
"Margo." She kept her tone light, aiming for casual. "Why does that freak even want the files? Chris implied that it was political. Is that true?"
The pause on the other end lasted only a second.
"He is trying to find a traitor in Valcourt who sold information to the Archambault sellouts."
She said it quickly. Clean and rehearsed in the way things sounded when you had prepared an answer in advance and were delivering it without thinking too hard about it.
I exhaled slowly.
The Archambault sellouts.
So she believed the official version. She had grown up hearing the same story everyone heard, the one that had been carefully maintained and circulated through Beaumont for seven years, and she had filed it away as fact. The Archambaults were traitors. They sold information. The pack was right to act.
I had helped build that story. I had let it be built around me and said nothing.
I reached out and took the phone from Shanelle’s hand.
She let me have it without resistance.
I looked at the screen for one moment before I put it to my mouth.
"So you are fine?"
The silence that followed was brief but absolute.
Then her voice came through again, and this time the composure had shifted into something that sounded less like performance and more like pure, unfiltered disbelief.
"Mom?"