Chapter 290: Stupid games

ÉTIENNE

My neck screamed the moment I sat up, a deep grinding ache that radiated down into my shoulders, and for a disoriented second I couldn’t understand why my own body felt like it had been used as a weapon against me.

“Margaux?” I called out, my voice cracking, rougher than it should have been.

No answer.

I pushed myself upright anyway, ignoring the way the room tilted, ignoring the raw, wrong feeling still lingering at the base of my skull, and stumbled toward the door completely naked, too disoriented to care.

Laurent stood in the hallway.

“You’re naked,” he said, immediately averting his eyes, reaching for a robe hanging near the door and shoving it toward me without quite meeting my gaze. “Put this on.”

“Where is she?” I demanded, ignoring the robe entirely, gripping his shoulder instead. “Laurent. Where is Margaux?”

“She’s not here,” he said, and something in his voice, careful, clipped, told me immediately that this was worse than a simple absence.

The memories started to hit my mind in slow degrees.

So I shoved past him toward my desk, grabbing my phone, and dialing her number with hands that weren’t fully steady. It rang twice before going straight to voicemail.

“Why isn’t she picking up,” I demanded, dialing again. “Laurent, where is she?”

I knew the answer. But I hoped… I prayed to be wrong.

He didn’t answer.

I looked up, and he was holding something out toward me. A folded piece of paper, with her handwriting visible along the edge where the fold had loosened.

“What is that?”

“Read it,” he said quietly.

I snatched it from him and unfolded it standing right there in the hallway, my eyes tearing through her words faster than my mind could properly absorb them. It was everything my memory had told me even though I had hoped it would betray me just this once. The thread… The gold… Theodore… The war… Beaumont.

I read the line about breaking my neck three times before it actually landed. Then she finished with an apology.

The paper crumpled in my fist.

“She what,” I said, my voice gone dangerously quiet.

“Étienne—”

“She broke my fucking neck,” I said, louder now, “and drove herself into the middle of an army that wants me dead, and you let her.”

“I didn’t let her do anything easily,” Laurent said, standing his ground despite the fury radiating off me. “I fought her on it. I told her it was insane.”

“And then you handed her a car anyway.”

“Yes.”

I crossed the distance between us in two strides and grabbed the front of his shirt, twisting the fabric into my fist, close enough that I could feel his breath against my face.

“Why,” I shrieked, “would you help her do this to me?”

Laurent didn’t flinch. He didn’t fight my grip either, just stood there, letting me hold him, letting me shake with a rage I couldn’t fully direct anywhere useful.

“Because I understood her,” he said. “Because I know exactly what it feels like to watch a gold thread form and know what it means. Even if I did not know at the time that was what was going to happen to Theodore because I could not see threads of… fate… I watched it happen to Theodore. I know what it does to a person, seeing that certainty settle into your chest and knowing you’d do anything, anything at all, to change it if you knew and if you had a chance.”

“That doesn’t give you the right—”

“It gave me every right,” Laurent cut in, his voice cracking slightly now. “You want to know why I let her go? Because if I’d seen that thread on myself and Theodore or even you and me, if I’d had even the smallest chance to save him or you before that battlefield of fate and destiny takes any of you from me, I would have done exactly what she did. Hell, for Theodore, I would have broken his neck myself if it meant keeping him breathing one more day.”

Something in me wavered.

I hated that it wavered.

“She could die out there,” I said. “Do you understand that? She walked willingly into my enemy’s territory, unprotected, with a target already painted on her back, because she’s convinced herself that martyring herself is somehow noble.”

“I know.”

“And you just let her.”

“I did. That is her family. What is the worst they could do?”

I released his shirt, shoving him back a step, my hands shaking now with something that wasn’t entirely anger anymore.

“You’re supposed to protect this family,” I said. “That’s your entire purpose as Beta. You’re supposed to keep us together, keep us safe, and instead you handed my mate the keys to a car so she could drive straight into a war zone.”

“I know what my job is.”

“Do you?” I stepped closer again. “Because it doesn’t feel like it right now. It feels like you failed at the one thing you’re actually supposed to be good at. Maybe that’s a pattern with you. Maybe that’s why Theodore—”

I stopped myself.

The words hung there anyway, half spoken but complete enough that I watched them land, watched something crack open behind Laurent’s eyes, raw and immediate, like I’d reached into his chest and torn something out by the root.

“Say it,” he said, his voice gone flat and dangerous. “Finish the sentence, Étienne. You want to hurt me so you should be proud to know that those words will achieve exactly that.”

I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and something about the quiet devastation in his voice hurt worse than if he’d screamed at me instead.

“Laurent—”

“No.” He held up a hand, cutting me off, his jaw working like he was fighting to keep something contained. “You don’t get to say that and then apologize your way out of it five seconds later. I have carried Theodore’s death every single day since it happened. I have wondered every single day whether there was something I could have done differently, some version of that day where I moved faster, fought harder, got there in time. And you just used that against me because you’re hurting and you needed somewhere to put it.”