Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

I closed the door behind me with a click that sounded too loud in the quiet hallway. My hand stayed on the knob longer than necessary, fingers tight against the brass, grounding myself in the cool metal before I turned around.

Margaux was already sitting up.

She had pulled the blanket to her chest, but her shoulders were rigid, her head tilted at an angle that told me she was tracking every movement I made. The sleep had cleared from her eyes, replaced by something sharper, more animal. She had always been able to read me, even when I thought I had perfected the blank mask that got me through council meetings and diplomatic dinners.

"You’re holding your breath," she observed.

I let go of the knob and exhaled, deliberately slow, trying to reset my face into something that wouldn’t worry her. It didn’t work. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, feet bare against the floor, and stood up with a steadiness that surprised me given how little sleep she’d actually gotten.

"Who was on the phone?"

I walked to the window instead of answering her. The glass was cold against my palm as I pulled back the curtain. Outside, the Valcourt grounds stretched out in orderly rows of gardens and training yards, sentinels moving in predictable patterns along the perimeter walls. I had spent years learning those patterns, memorizing the shifts, calculating how long it would take to breach them from the outside. Now I was calculating how long we had before someone else tried.

"Étienne."

I turned back to her. She had crossed the room without me hearing, standing close enough that I could see the faint trace of tears dried on her cheeks, the slight puffiness around her eyes from crying. She looked fragile in a way that made me want to lie, to wrap her in silence and handle everything myself. But she also looked determined in a way that told me she would see through any lie I tried to tell.

"Beaumont knows who I am," I told her. "They know about the Archambault name. They know why I took you."

She didn’t flinch. Her hands stayed at her sides, but her fingers curled inward, nails pressing against her palms. "How?"

"Someone told them. They told your father this morning."

"Chris." She said the name like it tasted bitter. "Of course he did."

She turned away from me and walked back toward the bed, but she didn’t sit down. She stood beside it, staring at the rumpled sheets where we had slept, or tried to sleep, only hours ago. Her hair fell forward, shielding her face from me.

"They’re calling it an act of war," I continued. "Not a broken alliance or a political dispute. They’re framing it as an attack on the institution of marriage itself. They say I intend to use you as a weapon. That I infiltrated the Beaumont bloodline for revenge and nothing else."

"And?" She didn’t look up.

"And they’re building a coalition. Two neighboring packs so far, maybe more. They intend to end my life, Margaux. Publicly, if they can manage it. They want to make an example of what happens when someone violates the sanctity of mating."

She laughed then, a short, harsh sound that had nothing to do with humor. "The sanctity of mating. That’s rich coming from a man who married me off to a stranger without caring what I wanted."

"They don’t care about what you want," I warned her. "They care about what you represent. A daughter used as a pawn by a rogue. If they can sell this as a threat to every political marriage in the territory, they turn it from a private grudge into a universal concern. Nobody wants to be the pack that stayed silent while daughters became targets."

She finally looked at me. Her eyes were dry now, too dry, the way people looked when they had cried out everything they had and found something harder underneath. "My mother didn’t tell them."

It wasn’t a question.

"She wrote letters," Margaux continued. "To my father, to Lucian, to Bastien. If she had told them the truth about who I was, about what she did to your family, they wouldn’t be able to frame it this way. They would know you had cause. They would know you were not exactly wrong and give reparations."

I shook my head. "Even if she told them, it might not have changed anything. Alphas don’t forgive being tricked. They don’t forgive having their pride wounded. Knowing they were wrong about my family and used by Lucian would just make them angrier, not more understanding."

"No. I refuse to believe that." Margaux reached for her phone on the nightstand, her movements precise and deliberate. "I believe that your experience in the past is making you believe they would be like that. He would see reason. He would listen to reason."

She unlocked the screen and started scrolling through her contacts. I crossed the room in three strides and put my hand over hers, stopping her before she could press the call button.

"Don’t," I insisted. "Whatever you’re thinking of doing, it won’t help."

"I’m calling my father."

"Margaux, he won’t listen. He’s already decided I’m the villain in this story. He’s already committed to war. Hearing your voice won’t change that. It will probably just give him more ammunition."

She looked up at me, her thumb hovering over the screen. "You think he’ll use me against you even if I reveal everything to him?"

"I think he’ll hear whatever he wants to hear. If you tell him you’re safe, he’ll think I’m forcing you to say that. If you tell him you don’t want war, he’ll think I’ve brainwashed you. There’s no version of this conversation where he believes you have agency. Perhaps that is what the boy who is obsessed with you was hoping for."

"Then I’ll make him believe it." She pulled her hand free from mine, gently but firmly, and pressed the call button before I could stop her again. "I have to try, Étienne. He’s still my father. However flawed, however wrong he is about everything else, he raised me. If I don’t at least attempt to stop this before it starts, I’m no better than he is, making decisions about people’s lives without giving them a chance to choose differently."

The phone rang twice. Three times. I could hear the faint sound of the connection from where I stood, the electronic hum of waiting.

Then he answered.

"Margaux?" The voice that came through the speaker was rough, frayed at the edges, nothing like the controlled authority I remembered from the Alpha of Beaumont. "Margaux, is that you? Are you alright? Where are you?"

She tapped the speaker button and set the phone on the bed between us, stepping back so we were both in range of the microphone. Her shoulders straightened, her chin lifted, and I saw her slip into a version of herself I had only seen glimpses of before. The Luna. A diplomat at heart. The woman who had learned to fawn before she learned to ride a bicycle.

"I’m fine, Father," she replied, her voice steady and clear. "I’m safe. I’m with Étienne at Valcourt."

A pause stretched through the connection, heavy with static and something else. Breathing. Rapid, shallow breathing that suggested a man on the verge of panic or rage.

"Put him on," her father demanded. "Put that bastard on the phone right now."

"He’s here. He can hear you. I’ve put you on speaker."

"Take me off speaker," he snapped. "I want to talk to my daughter privately. I need to know you’re really alright. I need to know he hasn’t hurt you."

"He hasn’t hurt me," Margaux answered, her tone unchanged. "I’m calling because I heard you’re planning to start a war. I heard you’re gathering allies to attack Valcourt. I need you to stop."

Another pause followed, and it was longer this time. I could almost see him on the other end, standing in his study with the maps spread out across his desk, the sentinels waiting in the hallway for their marching orders. I could picture his face turning red, the vein on his forehead that I had seen once in passing, the one that appeared when he was trying to control his temper.

"Margaux," he said, and his voice had dropped to something resembling gentleness, the way people spoke to injured animals or frightened children. "I know you think you’re safe. I know he’s probably told you all sorts of things to make you trust him. But you need to listen to me very carefully. This man is not who he says he is. He’s an Archambault. You know what he is. You know what his family did and how that sick family of his tried to destroy ours years ago, and he’s finishing what they started. You’re not safe. You’re a prisoner, and you don’t even know it. I cannot blame you, though. This is my fault, and I intend to make it right."

"I’m not a prisoner," she replied. "I walk freely through these halls. I speak to whoever I choose. I’m calling you on my own phone, of my own volition. No one is forcing me to say any of this. I know who he is, and I have known since we were bonded by marriage."

"Then why does he stand right there listening to every word?" her father challenged. "Why in Selene’s name are you defending him?"

"I am not defending him," she answered. "This is the truth and reality, and I have no idea why you would assume the worst. I’m not hiding anything, Father. I’m standing in the light telling you the truth. Chris is not to be trusted. I have no idea what he told you. But he lied. I don’t want you to start a war. I don’t need rescuing. I’m exactly where I choose to be."

"Choose?" He laughed, and the sound was ugly, broken. "You think you chose this? He manipulated you. He manipulated us too. He has gotten inside your head, or maybe you are pretending to be his willing slave because you are still trapped in those walls. Regardless, you will be saved. You hear that, rogue. I will save my daughter."

"Dad?!"

He was not hearing her. "Chris warned me about this. He told me Étienne was making you believe you were insane, making you doubt your own memories. Now you’re standing there parroting his words, defending your own captor. This isn’t you, Margaux. This isn’t my daughter."

"I am your daughter," she said, and her voice cracked slightly, the first break in her composure since the call began. "But I’m also myself. I’m the person who lived in that house for years, watching you make decisions without asking me what I wanted. I’m the person you married off to a man you knew nothing about because it served your political interests, and you did not want a war then. And I’m the person who is telling you, right now, that starting a war will not save me. It will only get people killed. People on both sides. For what? So you can punish a man for taking something you never really wanted to keep in the first place?"

"Watch your tone," he warned, the gentleness evaporating completely. "I am still your Alpha. I am still your father."

"Then act like it," she snapped, the words coming out sharp and sudden, interrupting him. "Act like someone who cares more about his daughter’s safety than his own pride. If you truly cared about me, you would ask what I want. You would listen when I tell you I’m not in danger. You would believe me when I say that the only threat to my well-being and others’ right now is the army you’re assembling outside these walls."

"I can’t believe you," he said, and his voice had gone flat, dead. "Even if I wanted to, I can’t. You’ve been compromised. The Margaux I raised would never speak to me this way. She would never defend a rogue who infiltrated her own pack and Valcourt. She would never choose her captor over her family."

"I’m not choosing him over you," Margaux insisted, her hands clenching at her sides. "I’m choosing peace over war. I’m choosing truth over lies. I’m choosing to use my voice instead of letting you speak for me."

"Put him on," her father repeated. "I want to hear him say something. I want to hear him explain how he managed to turn my daughter against her own blood in less than what..."

I stepped closer to the phone, but Margaux held up her hand, stopping me from speaking.

"He doesn’t need to explain anything," she said. "I’m not against you, Father. I’m against this war. I’m against the idea that my life, my marriage, my choices are suddenly public property because you feel embarrassed. You want to punish Étienne for outsmarting you. You want to punish him for being better at the game you never even taught me to play. But this isn’t about the sanctity of marriage. You and I both know that. This is about control. You lost it, and you want it back, and you’re willing to kill for it because you lost to a rogue."

"You don’t understand what you’re talking about," he muttered. "You don’t understand the position I’m in. The other packs are watching. If I back down now, if I let this stand, I become the Alpha who let a rogue steal his daughter without consequence. I become weak. I become a target."

"Then be something else," she pleaded, and her voice dropped, becoming softer, more intimate. "Be the Alpha who listened to his daughter. Be the father who trusted her judgment. Be the man who chooses his family over his pride, just once. Please, Father. I’m asking you. As your daughter. Don’t do this."

The silence that followed was absolute. No breathing, no static, nothing but the empty void of a connection held open by someone who had stopped speaking but hadn’t hung up.

Then: "I have to go."

"Father—"

"I have to go," he repeated, louder this time, drowning her out. "I am in a council meeting. We’ll discuss this when you’re home."

"I’m not coming home," she told him. "Not if you’re marching to war. Not if you can’t look me in the eye and tell me you believe what I’m saying."

"You’ll come home," he said, and there was something final in it, something that sounded almost like a threat. "One way or another, Margaux.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!