Chapter 295: The Prisoner of Beaumont

MARGAUX

He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, his face shadowed by the flickering torchlight overhead. Our eyes met. I expected triumph there, or at least satisfaction. Instead, he looked hollow. His mouth was set in a straight line, neither smiling nor frowning. He watched me pass with a silence that felt heavier than any words could have been.

I stopped. The sentinels behind me paused, uncertain.

“You got what you wanted,” I told him. My voice was steady even though my hands had started to shake.

Chris pushed off the wall. He took one step toward me, close enough that I could smell the soap he always used, close enough that I saw the muscle jumping in his jaw. For a moment, I thought he would speak. I thought he would gloat or apologize or explain.

He said nothing. He simply looked at me, his eyes tracing the lines of my face as if he were memorizing them, or perhaps searching for something he had lost. Then he stepped back and returned to his position against the wall, his gaze dropping to the floor.

It was worse than gloating. Gloating would have been human. This was something else entirely, something cold and distant that told me he had already moved me into a different category in his mind. Perhaps not the object of his affection anymore. Just a problem to be solved.

But the threads in our hands broke that illusion almost immediately.

“Keep walking,” the sentinel behind me whispered.

I did. I climbed the stairs that led to my wing, my legs heavy with each step. The familiar corridor stretched ahead, lined with doors I had passed a thousand times as a child. The wallpaper was the same faded blue with silver fleur-de-lis. The carpet was the same worn runner that had tripped me a while back. Nothing had changed since I left.

The sentinels stopped at my old bedroom door. The taller one opened it. The hinges squeaked, a sound that triggered a sudden, violent memory of sneaking out at sixteen, of pressing my ear against this same wood to listen for my mother’s footsteps.

“Your phone,” the other sentinel said, holding out his hand.

I stared at him.

“Alpha’s orders.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the device. It was warm from my body heat, the screen dark. I thought of Étienne, unconscious in our room at Valcourt, waking up alone. I thought of the message I couldn’t send, the explanation he would never receive if my father decided to keep me here forever.

I placed it in the sentinel’s palm. He closed his fingers around it and stepped back.

“Two guards will remain posted outside,” he informed me. “If you need anything essential, knock.”

“And if I need my freedom?”

He didn’t answer. He pulled the door shut and the lock clicked.

I stood in the center of my bedroom and listened to their footsteps retreat for a short distance. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, a sound so familiar it felt like a heartbeat I had forgotten I had.

The room was exactly as I remembered. The canopy bed with its dusty rose curtains. The writing desk where I had composed letters to Etienne that I never sent. The window seat overlooking the gardens where I had read books about faraway places, dreaming of escape.

I walked to the bed and sat down. The mattress sighed beneath my weight, the same tired protest it had made. I ran my hand over the quilt, fingers catching on a loose thread. I pulled it, watching the fabric pucker.

Étienne’s voice came back to me then, clear as if he were standing in the corner. I hate to say it, but I think your life at Beaumont is essentially over. Whatever place you had there before, it likely doesn’t exist anymore.

I had argued with him. I had insisted my father would listen to reason, that he would see me as his daughter rather than as a political liability. I had been so certain that blood meant something, that the man who raised me would choose me over his pride.

The door was locked. My phone was gone. My brother was dead, or believed to be. My father had looked at me like I was a stranger, or worse, an enemy.

You were right, I thought to the empty room. You were right, and I walked in anyway.

I stood up and walked to the window. The glass was cold against my fingertips. Outside, the Beaumont grounds stretched into darkness, the training yards empty, the perimeter walls illuminated by sentinel torchlights.

I pressed my forehead against the glass. The chill bit into my skin, waking me up.

I could disappear.

The thought arrived fully formed, like a gift. I didn’t have to stay here and play the martyr. I didn’t have to let them force me to stay a pawn. I could climb out this window, scale the trellis, slip past the sentinels who were watching the door but not the drop, and vanish.

Not back to Valcourt, obviously. That would only lead Étienne into the trap I had tried to escape. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. A city where no one knew my name, where the threads of fate couldn’t find me, where I could be nobody instead of Margaux Beaumont.

The thought was seductive. It tasted like freedom, sharp and metallic on my tongue.

But then I thought of Étienne waking up alone, reading my letter, believing I had abandoned him. I thought of Laurent trying to hold him back from marching on this place. I thought of Shanelle locked in a cell somewhere in this same house because she had tried to tell the truth.

Disappearing would save me. It wouldn’t save anyone else.

I turned away from the window and looked at the room. The shadows had grown longer, stretching across the floor like fingers. I was tired. My bones ached with an exhaustion that had nothing to do with the drive from Valcourt and everything to do with the weight of choices I couldn’t undo.

A knock sounded at the door.

I stiffened. The sentinels wouldn’t knock. They would unlock. I waited, holding my breath, my hand drifting toward the lamp on the nightstand. It was heavy, ceramic. A weapon if I needed one.

With Chris, I could need it.

“Who is it?” I called out.

“It’s me.” The voice was muffled through the wood, but I recognized it immediately. Rémy. I’ve brought food. The guards said I could bring you a tray.”

The lock clicked.

I looked up just as the door swung open.

Rémy stepped inside, a tray balanced carefully in his hands, but my attention went straight past him. Two sentinels stood behind him in the corridor, flanking the doorway like they had been assigned to make sure he didn’t stay too long. Before I could ask what they were doing there, the door shut behind him, the lock clicking firmly into place.

Relief hit me so hard it nearly buckled my knees.

I crossed the room and threw my arms around him, hugging him so tightly the tray tilted dangerously in his hands.

“Margaux—”

He caught himself, shifting the tray before it could spill.

“I thought they wouldn’t let anyone come in.”

“I barely convinced them,” he murmured, his voice muffled against my hair.

I held on anyway.