Chapter 157: As Promised
MARGAUX
"Where is Alpha Dorian?"
The sentinel by the staircase turned, his face flickering between the urge to help and the instinct to block my way, weighing my urgency in the moment.
"His room, Luna Margaux. He is resting this morning and has requested—"
"Which room exactly?"
He started to answer, but I was already in motion, my feet carrying me away before his words had fully left his mouth.
At the top of the stairs, an Omega blocked my path, hands lifted in a gesture that was both apologetic and unyielding, the stance of someone determined to do their duty.
"Luna Margaux, the Alpha has specifically requested no disturbances. If you could perhaps wait in the sitting room and I could send word—"
"The Alpha might be getting poisoned right now," I said.
She moved aside in silence, letting me pass without protest.
Two more sentinels flanked his door at the end of the corridor, and they tried the same routine, positioning themselves with the practiced efficiency of people who had been given clear instructions and intended to follow them. I pushed through them both with the same sentence, and I heard one of them fall into step behind me, which meant he had decided his job now was to follow rather than obstruct, and I could live with that.
The head healer caught up to me at the threshold, slightly out of breath, his expression occupying the complicated territory between alarmed and resigned.
I pushed the door open.
An Omega stood bent over Alpha Dorian’s bedside table, a small ceramic cup of water in one hand and two pills in the other palm, both already extended toward him. Dorian’s fingers were reaching forward to accept them.
I strode across the room in eight quick steps and swept the pills and cup from her hands.
The pills scattered across the floorboards, the cup toppling and spilling water that seeped into the wood in a widening stain.
"What is this insolence!" Dorian’s voice cracked through the room like a whip, so sharp and commanding that the sentinel behind me recoiled, stumbling a step back. He surged upright, fists clenching on the sheets, his glare a storm of outrage and disbelief. Fury radiated from him, cold and lethal, as if my very presence was an act of war. "Who allowed this girl past my door—"
"I am sorry, Alpha Dorian." The head healer appeared behind my shoulder, genuinely breathless now. "She moved very quickly, I could not—"
"You are being poisoned," I said.
The room went completely still.
The Omega who had been holding the pills and water dropped to her knees before anyone could say another word, her hands pressing flat against the floorboards, her voice shaking hard enough that the words barely held their shape.
"Alpha Dorian. I swear to you on every ancestor I have ever had. I would never. Eleven years in this household. I would never, never, never—"
"It is not her," I said. "It is not any of your staff."
The woman kept shaking on the floor. I looked away from her because watching her face was making it harder to hold the thread of what I needed to say.
Dorian’s eyes stayed on mine.
"Then who?" he said. The fury had not left, but something underneath it had sharpened into something more considered.
"Your daughter," I said. "Céline."
He laughed.
It was a brief, dismissive sound, the sort of laugh that tossed my words straight into the realm of nonsense without a second thought.
"Your symptoms," I said, before he could follow the laugh with words that would make this harder. "The fatigue that has gotten significantly worse over recent months. The joint deterioration that your healer has not been able to fully account for. The cognitive episodes that come and go with no discernible pattern." I turned to the head healer. "Hollowroot. Administered consistently over time in the right dose. What does that produce?"
The head healer fell silent, the kind of silence that comes when months of memories suddenly rearrange themselves into a disturbing new pattern.
"Goddess," he said softly.
"What?" Dorian said.
"It would produce almost exactly what you have been presenting with, Alpha." The head healer’s voice came out careful, each word chosen with the deliberateness of someone who understood the weight of what he was saying. "The progression of it. The pattern. I could not find a source because I was looking for illness. I was not looking for—" He stopped.
"For poison," Dorian said.
Nobody answered him.
He fixed me with the steady gaze of someone who had learned that the silence before an answer often holds more truth than the answer itself.
"Why," he said, "would I believe a single word you say to me? You are a Beaumont girl sitting in my house under circumstances neither of us really chose or wanted. I have humiliated you at my own table in front of people. I have made very clear since you arrived that you are tolerated in this house rather than welcomed." He held my gaze without apology. "Valcourt does not operate the way Beaumont does. We do not play mental games dressed up as strategy and call it politics."
"In truth," I said, "I would not care if you died."
"Luna Margaux." The head healer’s voice carried a note of genuine alarm.
"No," I said. "He will appreciate honesty over performance, and I think he deserves to know exactly where I stand before I tell him what I came here to tell him." I looked at Alpha Dorian directly. "You have been nothing but cruel to me since I arrived. I owe you nothing personally. If this were a choice I was making for myself and no one else, I would have kept quiet and let whatever was happening to you continue without interruption."
Dorian said nothing.
"But I made a promise," I said. "And I intend to keep it regardless of what I personally feel about you or what you personally feel about me."
"To whom," he said slowly, "did you make this promise?"
I turned my head to the left.
The third apparition of Theodore sat in the chair beside his father’s bed. The one that had presumably looked empty to everyone in this room since the moment I walked through the door. He was watching the old man with an expression I had not seen on either of his other versions, none of the peace that had come with the Laurent apparition’s resolution, none of the raw rage that had driven the Céline version to throw furniture across a study. Just something complicated and not yet finished, sitting in the lines of his face like a question that had been waiting a very long time for the right moment to be asked.
"Your son would like to speak to you," I said.
Dorian’s face went through something I could not fully catalog. His jaw tightened first, then his hands, then something around his eyes that might have been grief fighting to surface against the habit of suppressing it in front of other people.
"What did you say to me?" he said.
"Your son Theodore is in this room with us right now." I kept my voice steady. "I can see him. I know how that sounds. I also know that you have been sitting in this room every morning taking pills that your own daughter has been lacing, and I know that because a ghost told me, and I came running here anyway because I promised him I would. I promised Theodore I would." I looked at the apparition. "You owe me enormously for this."
Theodore glanced at me, and beneath all his grief, there was a flicker that nearly resembled gratitude.
I took a slow breath.
"I give you permission to possess me," I said.