Claimed by the scarred Alpha

BASTIEN

Mother had vanished sometime in the night, and the fact that she hadn’t so much as left a note told me everything I needed to know about how much of our relationship had ever been real to begin with. Especially after her fucking promise.

It was all lies, apparently. All of it. Right up until the very end.

I stood out on my balcony longer than I should have, the cold morning air doing nothing to clear the fog that had settled over my thoughts these past few days. From up here, the courtyard looked impossibly small, the gravel path winding between hedges someone had trimmed into perfect, obedient shapes.

It would be so easy.

The thought arrived without permission, quiet and almost gentle in the way it slid into my mind, and I let myself stand there considering it for longer than I should have. If I couldn’t have the one thing I actually wanted in this life, maybe there wasn’t much point wanting anything else. Maybe something drastic was the only language this family had ever bothered learning. Maybe it would finally make someone listen.

I thought of my sister again.

Margaux, practically sold off to a man none of us had properly vetted, married away like a transaction rather than a person. I wondered if this was what she’d felt, standing at whatever version of this ledge her own life had handed her. Torn apart. Sold cheap for peace. The thought made something twist sick and hollow in my stomach.

I looked down again.

I wouldn’t survive a fall from this height if I completely let go. That much I understood with a clarity that frightened me.

Then I thought of her.

The woman I loved. She would be in hell too and I would be the reason any of that hell existed in the first place, and I understood, all at once, that stepping off this balcony wouldn’t save her. It would only mean she would eventually die out there somewhere, wherever they were keeping her, without a single person left in this world still fighting to bring her home.

I stepped back from the railing.

A knock sounded at my door, sharp and sudden enough that I flinched.

"Who is it?" I called.

"I have a letter for you, Alpha Bastien." An Omega’s voice, muffled through the wood.

I crossed the room and opened the door, finding her standing there with an envelope held carefully in both hands.

"Who still sends those," I muttered, mostly to myself.

She bowed slightly.

"It’s from someone named Isabelle."

I stared at the envelope for a moment, my mind scrambling for context I didn’t have. I didn’t know anyone by that name. I took it from her, closed the door, and tore it open before I’d even fully processed why my hands were suddenly shaking.

Perhaps it was some coded message. Perhaps she’d found a way to reach me after all, using a name I wouldn’t recognize specifically so no one intercepting it would think twice.

I unfolded the letter and began to read.

"Dear Bastien,

You don’t know me, not really, though I imagine by the time this reaches you, that will already have changed. My name is Isabelle. I am not your mother. I am, and have always been, your aunt.

Your mother, my twin sister, died many years ago. Before you were old enough to remember her properly. I took her place afterward, for reasons too long and too painful to explain fully in a letter, and I raised you partly believing I was protecting you and myself by keeping that truth buried. I understand now how wrong I was to make that choice on your behalf, and how much of your life since has been shaped by lies I told to keep myself safe rather than lies that ever truly served you.

I am sorry, Bastien. For all of it. For the years of silence, for standing by while my brother used you as a tool in his schemes, for every time I watched you and your siblings suffer under expectations neither of us ever chose and said nothing to stop it. You deserved a mother who fought for you, not one who hid behind a stolen name and called it love.

I do not have much time left to write this, so let me say the part that matters most.

The pack’s mentality will not change overnight. It may not change in your lifetime at all, no matter how hard you push against it. But do not let that stop you from writing the story you actually want for yourself. Whether that means fighting the system that has caged you since birth, or walking away from it entirely and building something new somewhere it cannot follow you, the choice is yours to make. It was always supposed to be yours.

Your love is alive.

I need you to hold onto that above everything else in this letter. My brother is many terrible things, but he is not careless with leverage that still serves his purposes, and you, married properly into Pack Texier, are exactly the outcome he has been engineering for months. He will not have killed her while that outcome remains out of reach.

I believe I know where she is being kept. He has an office he rarely lets anyone else into, tucked away where prying eyes and loyal ears cannot easily reach. I would start there, and I would start soon, before whatever plan he still has left finishes unraveling around him and he decides loose ends are no longer worth the risk of keeping. The location is at xxxxxxxxx

Go get her, Bastien.

Live the life neither of us ever let ourselves have the courage to choose.

All my love,

Isabelle"

My hands were trembling by the time I reached the last line, the paper crinkling under the force of my grip.

Alive...

She was alive.

I read the line about the office three more times, committing every word to memory, and something that had gone cold and hollow inside me for days finally sparked back to life.

I was done standing on balconies.

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