Chapter 292: A Secret Worth Burying

MARGAUX

“Where is my father?” I asked the nearest Omega, my voice clipped enough that she flinched before answering.

“The war room,” she said. “The old annex. He’s been there for a while now.”

I didn’t wait for directions. I already knew the way, every corridor of this estate mapped into my bones from childhood, and I walked it now with a purpose that felt entirely unfamiliar in a body that had spent years learning to shrink itself smaller in these halls.

Two sentinels stood outside the annex doors, and they crossed their guns the moment they saw me approaching.

“Luna Margaux, the Alpha is in a private meeting.”

“Move.”

“We have orders—”

I didn’t slow down. I shouldered past the crossed guns with a confidence I didn’t entirely feel, and by the time they scrambled to grab me, I’d already thrown the doors open.

The room fell silent.

Maps covered the long table, marked with troop positions and territory lines, and a dozen faces turned toward me at once: sentinel captains, emissaries from allied packs, my father standing at the head of the table with a compass in his hand.

He froze.

“Margaux.”

“Hello, Father.”

Whispers rippled through the room, and I turned to face the gathered officers directly, my chin lifted, refusing to let the tremor in my chest reach my voice.

“I’m here,” I said, “which means there is no reason for any of this to continue.”

My father’s face flushed dark.

“Everyone out,” he snapped, and the room emptied fast, chairs scraping, footsteps hurrying, until the heavy doors closed and left just the two of us standing on opposite ends of a table covered in plans for a war that no longer had any justification behind it.

“Have you lost your mind?” he demanded the moment we were alone. “Walking in here unannounced, interrupting a war council—”

“Or do you simply want a war,” I cut in, “regardless of whether I’m here? Because if my presence is the excuse, Father, then I’m removing it. If it was never about me at all, then perhaps you should say that plainly instead of hiding behind my supposed rescue.”

He set the compass down hard enough to make it rattle against the map.

“You think I wanted this,” he said. “You think any part of me enjoys the idea of marching against Valcourt?”

“Now that I am here and can hear this from your lips, I can say that you are not stupid, Father. I think you would know when an entire coalition is built on a lie,” I said, “and I don’t know if that’s easier or harder to swallow than the alternative.”

“You don’t understand what happened here after that man took you.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said. “At first I thought that Chris fed you a story designed to make himself look heroic, and you swallowed it whole because it was easier than accepting that I chose my own life. But that is not what this is about.”

“What the heck do you think you know?” His voice rose. “This is about a rogue infiltrating my bloodline, about the safety of every daughter married off for peace across every allied territory. Do you have any idea what it would mean to let this stand unanswered? What message that sends?”

“I do know what it means,” I said. “It means you’d rather kill hundreds of people than admit you were wrong about something. Again.”

Something flickered across his face, old and wounded, before he masked it back into fury.

“I assume you had to escape him,” he said, “to get here. That must be why you’ve suddenly returned, ready to defend him so passionately. He’s finally shown you what he really is, and now you’re afraid, and you’ve come home.”

“I didn’t escape anything,” I said. “I left him unconscious, actually, so I could come here and stop this before it costs more lives than it’s already cost.”

His eyebrows rose sharply.

“Unconscious?”

“It doesn’t matter how,” I said, waving the question away before it could derail me. “What matters is that I came here hoping you would actually see reason once I stood in front of you. That another witch hunt against the last surviving Archambault is cruel, Father. You know it’s cruel. You must know it, because you got the letter.”

His expression shuttered.

“Or did the letter not tell you the truth?” I pressed. “That the Archambaults did nothing wrong? That they were simply accused, without evidence, and slaughtered for a crime that existed only in Uncle Lucian’s imagination?”

He didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that dread started pooling low in my stomach.

“It did,” he admitted finally, quiet.

I felt something in my chest crack wide open.

“Then I don’t understand,” I said, my voice climbing despite every effort to keep it level. “If you know they were innocent, if you know Étienne’s entire family died for nothing, why are you still doing this? Why are you still marching soldiers to finish what Uncle Lucian started? A lie to protect his own lie!”

My father’s jaw tightened.

“You want to talk about truth?” he said. “Fine. Let’s talk about truth, Margaux. Do you know what people will hear when they hear the so-called truth? That your mother’s brother tricked me multiple times? That he replaced your mother the moment she died, put another woman in her place, and convinced me to slaughter my own Beta and his entire family to cover for it without me even realizing that I was a pawn? I did not know my own wife had been switched for years. Years, Margaux. I sat across from her at dinner every night for many years and never once suspected. Is that sort of Alpha the man that should rule?”

The words hit me like a slap.

“I know,” I said. “I know all of it. Better than you, probably.”

“Then you understand,” he said, something almost pleading creeping into his voice now, “why I would rather bury it. All of it. Begin fresh, without dragging every rotten secret back into the light where it can destroy what’s left of this pack’s standing.”