Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

I emerged from the infirmary hours later, my body hollowed out in a way I’d never experienced before, as though grief had physically scooped something loose from inside my chest and left the cavity empty behind.

I didn’t expect to find anyone still in the hallway.

Surprisingly, Étienne sat against the wall directly across from the door, his knees drawn up, his head resting back against the stone. His eyes were rimmed red, the same raw red surrounding mine, and the sight of it stopped me short.

"You’re still here."

"Where else would I be?"

I studied him for a moment. The shadows beneath his eyes. The crease between his brows. The way his shoulders had collapsed forward, as though he’d been carrying something too heavy for too long and had finally run out of strength to pretend otherwise.

Something had happened to him while I’d been shut away with a letter and the body of the woman who used to be my mother.

I didn’t ask what.

I lowered myself onto the floor beside him, my back finding the same cold wall, our shoulders barely brushing.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

The silence didn’t feel awkward. It felt necessary. Like neither of us had enough left inside us for anything that required pretending.

"I read her letter." My voice came out scraped raw.

"I figured."

My fingers curled around the edge of my sleeve.

"Do you want to hear it?"

Étienne turned his head toward me. There was nothing guarded in his expression now, nothing of the careful composure he usually wore like armor.

"Only if you want to read it."

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the folded paper. The creases had softened from being opened and refolded so many times that afternoon. I smoothed it carefully against my knee, flattening each corner with my fingertips before finally looking down at the first line.

Then I began.

My voice held through the opening, through the parts about rank and fear and the wrong kind of loyalty. I managed the sentences about duty without breaking, even when my fingers tightened around the paper hard enough to wrinkle it again.

Then I reached the part about being loud.

My throat closed.

I swallowed and tried again.

She had written that I had spent too much of my life making myself smaller for people who had already decided I was too much. That I should take up space. That I should want things without apologizing for the wanting.

The first time I tried to read the line aloud, no sound came.

I blinked hard, lowered the page for a moment, and pressed my thumb against the crease running through the middle of the paper.

Étienne didn’t move.

He didn’t reach for me or tell me it was all right.

He simply stayed.

I drew in a shaky breath and started the sentence again.

This time, my voice made it three words before breaking completely.

"Be loud," I read, my throat closing around the words. "Be free. Be exactly who you were always meant to be, without anyone’s permission but your own."

I couldn’t force the last line past my lips.

The words blurred behind a fresh wash of tears. I lowered the letter into my lap and stared at it, my hands trembling so badly the paper rustled between my fingers.

Étienne reached over and took my free hand, threading his fingers through mine.

He still didn’t try to stop me from crying.

He simply held on.

After a moment, his thumb moved slowly across my knuckles.

"That’s beautiful," he murmured. "It sounds like something a mother would want her daughter to hear."

"She was my mother." The words caught somewhere between my teeth. "Biologically, anyway."

I looked down at the letter again, at the handwriting I had spent years wishing I knew better.

"But she had never really been a mother to me. Not in the ways that mattered." My fingers tightened around the paper. "And somehow, in that letter, she finally sounded like one."

My voice thinned.

"She sounded like a mother right up until the bitter end."

The memory came without permission.

Her body tearing itself apart to end the demon permanently. The look in her eyes. The certainty that she had already chosen what she was willing to lose.

I shut my eyes.

"Maybe that’s what actually made her one," Étienne murmured.

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

For once, I didn’t have an answer.

So I let the words settle between us, turning them over in the quiet, testing the shape of them without deciding whether I was ready to believe them.

After a while, I glanced at him.

"Why were your eyes red before I even came out here?"

His expression changed.

It was subtle, but I saw it. The way his jaw tightened. The way his gaze drifted somewhere beyond the opposite wall, as though he could still see something standing there that I couldn’t.

Grief passed through his face first.

Then wonder.

I knew that look.

I’d been wearing some version of it ever since I’d read the letter, caught between mourning everything I’d lost and trying to understand the things I had somehow been given back.

"My mother came."

I sat a little straighter.

"And Yann."

Étienne swallowed.

"They found me in the hallway, right after you went into the infirmary."

I stared at him.

"They visited you?"

"Both of them."

His gaze dropped to our joined hands. His thumb resumed its slow movement over my knuckles, almost absent-mindedly.

"Ghosts, I suppose."

He gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh that contained no humor.

"But they didn’t feel like ghosts."

His fingers tightened around mine.

"They felt..." He paused, searching for the word. "Solid. Real. Like they’d only been waiting for me to finally be ready to see them."

I said nothing.

He drew a slow breath.

"They said their goodbyes. The ones they never got to say when the fire took everything before either of them had the chance."

My chest tightened.

"What did they say?"

He told me slowly, piece by piece, as though he were still trying to find the right words for something that had been too strange and too precious to explain all at once. Yann’s stubborn resentment toward my family had softened into something closer to reluctant acceptance, while his mother had offered the kind of quiet, uncomplicated grace that made forgiveness sound less like surrender and more like finally being able to set something down.

I listened without interrupting, letting each word settle between us.

Something in my chest cracked further at that.

"She said that because of Isabelle... I mean my mother," I said quietly. "Because my mother chose to save me and them instead of letting the demon keep existing in whatever plane it came from ."

"Partly perhaps," Étienne said. "But I think it was more than that too. My mother never hated you for what happened to our family."

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