Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

"Hello, baby," my mother greeted me, and the sound of her voice, exactly as I remembered it, warm and slightly rough around the edges, nearly took my legs out from under me.

I took a step toward them.

They didn’t recede. They didn’t flicker away like some cruel trick my grief had conjured only to snatch them back again.

"How is this possible?" The words barely made it past my throat. "You’re both..."

"Dead," Yann finished for me, that same crooked grin tugging at his mouth. "Yeah. We know. Believe me, we’re the ones who’ve been dealing with the details of that particular situation for longer than you have."

A sound escaped me, caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

"You haven’t changed."

"Someone has to keep the family sense of humor alive." He looked me over, his grin widening. "You certainly weren’t doing it. Look at you. All grim and broody. Since when did you start wearing that expression like it’s permanently attached to your face?"

"Since watching my entire family burn," I shot back before I could stop myself. "And getting sold."

The humor vanished from the corridor.

Yann’s smile fell, and something older, heavier, settled over his translucent features.

"I know," he murmured. "We’ve been watching, in whatever way that thing allowed us to watch anything at all. We know what you went through. Most of it."

My mother drifted closer. She was near enough now that I could see the faint shimmer along the edges of her form, the light bending strangely through her as though she were made of water instead of flesh.

"I want to hug you."

Her voice fractured on the last word.

"I have wanted to for years."

She reached for my face anyway.

Her hand passed straight through my cheek, and all I felt was a faint, cool current where her palm should have been.

She withdrew slowly, looking down at her own translucent fingers.

"Hmmmm... I still can’t," she whispered. "I’m sorry."

"Don’t apologize." My throat tightened. "Please. You have nothing to apologize for."

"Neither do you," Yann added, his expression hardening as his attention shifted back to me. "But I do have questions."

I knew immediately where this was going.

"About her."

"Margaux," he clarified, though he didn’t need to. His eyes narrowed slightly. "A Beaumont, Étienne. Of all the women in this world, you had to fall for a Beaumont?"

"Yann," my mother cautioned.

"I’m not attacking him." He barely glanced at her, his gaze remaining fixed on me. "I’m asking a fair question."

He drifted a little closer, and the humor that usually softened his face was nowhere to be found.

"That family destroyed everything we had. Our home. Our lives. You." His voice faltered for the briefest moment before he forced it steady again. "I watched what they did to you, little brother. Things I wish I could unsee. And now you’re telling me you love one of them."

"She had nothing to do with what happened to us." My voice came out firmer than I expected. "She was a child, just like I was. She didn’t order any of it. She didn’t know what was happening. She was just as scared."

"I know."

The words came quietly this time.

Yann looked away, his jaw tightening as though he were fighting with something he had carried for far too long.

"I do know that." His gaze returned to mine, and for the first time, the anger in his eyes looked less like anger and more like grief that had never found anywhere else to go. "It doesn’t stop it from sitting wrong in my chest."

He swallowed.

"I don’t think it ever will."

"So you don’t approve."

"No." Yann’s answer was flat and honest. "I don’t think I ever will. Every time I imagine her face, I see her family’s name attached to it, and something in me refuses to separate the two, no matter how unfair that may be to her personally."

"Yann," my mother warned, sharper this time.

"Let me finish."

He held my gaze, the tension still visible in his jaw, though something in his expression had begun to soften.

"I don’t approve. But that was never actually my life to approve of." He paused, as though choosing his next words carefully. "If she makes you happy, genuinely happy, not the kind of happy you pretend to be for everyone else’s comfort, then you go be happy with her. My resentment doesn’t get a vote in that. It never can."

Something loosened in my chest, relief and grief tangling together so tightly that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me yet." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I still think it’s insane. I’m allowed to think that and support you at the same time. Brothers get to hold two things at once."

My mother shook her head, though a trace of fondness had crept into her expression despite herself.

"He means well," she murmured. "In his own stubborn way."

"I know."

I turned toward her.

"Do you feel the same way?" I asked. "About Margaux?"

She did practically raise her. But the betrayal had to have hurt. She would definitely hold a lot of resentment.

She was quiet for a moment, considering the question rather than reaching for the easiest answer.

"No." The word came gently. "I don’t carry what he carries. I’ve had time to see more of what actually happened, watching from wherever we were kept. I saw the demon’s hand in all of it. I saw Lucian’s cruelty for exactly what it was, a man’s ambition dressed up as necessity." Her eyes softened. "None of that belongs to a little girl who grew up knowing nothing about it."

She glanced at me, and there was something almost maternal in the sadness that settled across her face.

"And she lost her mother tonight, Étienne. Isabelle was cruel for what she helped do to our family, but she saved us tonight. I felt that loss the moment it happened, somehow, even from wherever we’ve been trapped inside that beast. I cannot hate an innocent child. I never could."

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