Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

The photographs spread across my desk in chronological order. Twenty-three images spanning five years, each one a record of her life continuing while mine burned to ash.

I added the new ones to the collection. Three shots from tonight’s gala, taken with a telephoto lens from across the ballroom. They were good shots.

One had Margaux in that silver dress, with her champagne flute raised, laughing at something her friend said. The second had Margaux weaving through the crowd toward the bar. The third had Margaux looking like she’d never spent a single night wondering if the boy she helped ruin had survived.

The secret room sat behind a false panel in my bedroom wall. I’d built it myself when I first moved into the Valcourt estate, needing a space where no one could interrupt the careful cataloging of my revenge. Photographs lined one section. News clippings filled another. A timeline stretched across the back wall, connecting names and dates and treasons with a red string that looked appropriately unhinged.

I ran my thumb across tonight’s photos. She’d looked so alive under those chandeliers, so untouched by guilt or grief or any recognition that the world had ended for someone she supposedly cared about. The silver dress had probably cost more than what most elite pack members earned in a month. The champagne had flowed freely. Her smile had been easy, bright, and completely unconscious.

She’d forgotten.

The realization didn’t surprise me anymore. I’d accepted it years ago when the first photograph taken with the help of a spy showed her at some charity gala, draped in designer everything, looking like a girl whose biggest concern was whether the champagne was properly chilled. Still, seeing her tonight had confirmed what I’d always known.

Margaux Beaumont had moved on. I had not.

The door to my bedroom opened without a knock. I didn’t bother hiding the photographs. Only one person walked into my space without permission, and she already knew about the collection.

"You actually went to Beaumont territory, didn’t you?"

Céline leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed. She wore silk pajamas, and her dark hair was loose around her shoulders. My sister had perfected the art of looking simultaneously elegant and dangerous, a skill she’d inherited from our father along with his ruthless practicality.

"It was a party." I kept my attention on the photographs, arranging tonight’s shots among the others. "If I wasn’t causing chaos, there would be no issue."

"But you are."

Her footsteps crossed the hardwood floor. I felt her presence at my shoulder, close enough that I caught the scent of her perfume. Something floral and expensive that she’d worn since she was sixteen and decided she was grown enough to have a signature scent.

She studied the new photographs. Her silence stretched longer than I expected, and when she finally spoke, her voice carried that particular edge that meant she was choosing her words carefully.

"If I’m being frank, I’m still not a fan of you wanting to marry her."

I turned to face her. The mask pressed against my skin, humid and suffocating in the temperature of this room. I’d kept it on longer than necessary, letting the discomfort serve as a reminder that some performances couldn’t end just because you’d left the stage.

"I explained it."

"I know. I know." Céline gestured toward the photographs, her hand moving in that dismissive way she used when she was conceding a point she disagreed with. "The Luna of the pack is the apple of a pack’s eye. If they cannot protect that apple, they cannot protect anything. This is a show of dominance. To see if they will sell their daughter off to save their skin."

The words sounded different coming from her mouth. Clinical and strategic. The kind of reasoning that made sense in war rooms and council meetings, but missed the deeper truth underneath.

I looked back at tonight’s photographs. Margaux mid-laugh, her head thrown back, completely unguarded. The image felt obscene in its innocence.

"I know Beaumont. They will sell her off."

The certainty sat in my chest like stone. I’d studied Armand Beaumont for years, tracked his decisions, and analyzed his priorities. The man valued power over people, profit over principle. He’d sacrificed lesser things than daughters to maintain his position. A marriage alliance that saved his territory while demonstrating his pragmatic flexibility would appeal to him on multiple levels.

And Margaux would go along with it because that was what good daughters did in families like hers.

"You needed to see her tonight." I tapped the photograph where she was smiling. "She was so full of life. You can tell she forgot. How could she forget what she and her family did to me?"

The question hung in the air between us. Céline didn’t answer immediately. She reached up instead, her fingers grazing the edge of my mask where it pressed against my temple.

"You’re still wearing your mask." Her voice softened. "It’s humid in this room. You should take it off."

"I will."

She accepted the deflection with the grace of someone who’d learned when to push and when to retreat. Her hand dropped from my face. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to the mask’s cheek, her lips touching bone-white porcelain instead of scarred skin.

"Goodnight, Théo."

She used the name our father had given me. The identity I’d built from ash and rage and the determination to claw my way out of a grave. Étienne Archambault had died in that trafficking ring. Théodore Valcourt had been born in blood and fire and Dorian’s grief-stricken mercy.

I waited until her footsteps faded down the hallway before moving. The secret room sealed with a soft click when I closed the panel. The photographs disappeared behind false wall. The timeline vanished. Everything that proved I was still fighting a war from years ago went back into hiding where it belonged.

The bathroom attached to my bedroom felt cooler than the main space. I’d left the window cracked earlier, letting in night air that carried the scent of rain and distant pine forests. The mirror above the sink reflected my masked face back at me, bone-white and inhuman, with antlers that could have scraped the ceiling if I stood too close.

I reached up and removed the mask.

The face underneath made my stomach turn even after all these years. Chemical burns had eaten through skin on the right side, leaving texture that looked like melted wax frozen mid-drip. The damage started at my hairline and traveled down past my eyebrow, across my cheekbone, ending just above my jaw. Only the left side from eyebrow to nose had escaped, a strip of unmarked skin that made the destruction everywhere else look worse by comparison.

I’d done this to myself. Poured a wicked mix of Wolfsbane and hot liquid silver across my own face in a trafficking house bathroom, screaming through the agony because unscarred flesh had value and I’d wanted to destroy every bit of worth they’d seen in me. Better to be worthless than sold. Better to be ruined than owned.

They’d beaten me nearly to death for it and dumped my body in an unmarked grave on the edge of Valcourt territory. Left me to rot with the other discarded mistakes.

Then I’d clawed my way out.

Memory hit without warning. Vivid, though I would have preferred it fractured. My parents burning alive as I screamed for mercy that never came. My brother, reaching for me through the flames, his hand outstretched, his mouth forming words I couldn’t hear over my own shrieking. The chains cutting into my wrists as I pulled against them. The smell of burning flesh. The sound of my mother’s voice cutting off mid-scream.

The Beaumont wolves who’d stood watching. Who’d held the torches. Who’d done nothing when I begged them to stop.

I braced my hands on the sink and forced myself to breathe. The porcelain felt cool under my palms. Grounding and real. This bathroom existed in the present, not in that nightmare almost seven years past.

A vase of forget-me-nots sat at the edge of the sink. Céline had started leaving them there years ago, some gesture of sisterly affection that she never explained and I never questioned because she understood that I liked them. The blue petals looked delicate against white porcelain, impossibly fragile in a room that housed so much ugliness.

I smiled at the flowers. The expression pulled at scar tissue, making my face ache in that familiar way.

"I have waited a long time for this, Margaux." My voice came out steady despite the rage burning underneath. "You will have to remember this face again."

I turned on the faucet and cupped cold water in my hands. It shocked against overheated skin when I splashed it across my face, running down scarred tissue and unmarked flesh without discrimination. Water dripped from my chin back into the basin. I watched it swirl down the drain, carrying nothing away, changing nothing, leaving me exactly as ruined as before.

The girl in the silver dress would see this face soon. She would understand exactly what her family’s betrayal had cost. She would learn that some things couldn’t be forgotten just because you’d moved on to champagne, galas, and a life built on the graves of people you claimed to love.

I splashed more water across my face and let it drip.

Two days until the wedding. Two days until Margaux Beaumont learned that the past didn’t stay buried just because you wanted it to.

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