Chapter 297 The Brother Who Lived

MARGAUX

Rémy set the tray down on the small table by the window, and for a moment, neither of us moved. The weight of everything sitting between us felt heavier than anything either of us knew how to say aloud.

Then he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, and patted the space beside him without a word.

It had been a long time since we had shared a closeness like this. Somewhere along the way, after a certain age, he and Bastien had started soaring ahead without me, leaving me to watch from a distance as they built a life I was no longer part of. So I could only imagine what Bastien’s death had done to him, what it had taken from the person sitting beside me.

I lowered myself onto the floor beside him.

The carpet was scratchy against my legs, worn thin in that particular spot from years of exactly this, the two of us sitting on this floor as children, hiding from lessons or from Chris’s teasing or from whatever chaos the estate had been suffering that week. Some things about this room hadn’t changed at all.

“Do you remember,” Rémy said quietly, “when Bastien tried to teach me to shift for the first time?”

I let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob.

“He was fourteen,” I said. “You were what, eleven?”

“Ten,” Rémy corrected, a faint smile tugging at his mouth despite everything. “And he told me the trick was to think about something that made me furious. So I thought about how he always ate the last of the honey cakes before I got any.”

“And you shifted.”

“Halfway,” he said. “Got stuck with a tail and nothing else. Ran around the garden for an hour looking like the world’s most confused half-boy, and Bastien laughed so hard he couldn’t even help me shift back properly.”

I pressed my palm against my mouth, laughter and grief tangling together until I couldn’t tell which one was actually winning.

“He used to sneak me sweets from the kitchen,” I said, “whenever Mother was too hard on me during etiquette lessons. He’d find me crying in the garden and just hand me something sticky and sugar sweet, like that fixed everything.”

“It usually worked, though.”

Tears formed around my eyes. “It usually did.”

We sat there for a while, trading pieces of him back and forth like that, small and ordinary memories that felt suddenly enormous now that the possibility of losing him sat so heavy in the room with us. I told him about the time Bastien had covered for me sneaking out to see Étienne, lying to Father’s face without even blinking. Rémy told me about the time Bastien had taken a beating meant for him after some prank gone wrong, never once mentioning it afterward, like it hadn’t cost him anything at all.

“He was always doing that,” I said. “Taking things onto himself so the rest of us didn’t have to carry them.”

Rémy’s smile faded slightly.

“Yeah,” he said. “He was. I guess that is why I cannot hate him for this. He deserves happiness.”

I understood what Rémy meant, or at least I thought I did. But the way he said it made something in me hesitate. How could Bastien’s happiness have anything to do with what our uncle had done to him? How could he speak of it so calmly when that said happiness had come at such a terrible cost?

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but the tears came again, hot and sudden, and the question stayed lodged behind my teeth. Rémy shifted closer, his shoulder pressing against mine, steady in a way that reminded me he wasn’t a child anymore, whatever version of him I still carried in my head.

Then his voice dropped low.

“Margaux,” he said, barely above a whisper, glancing toward the door.

I followed his gaze instinctively, toward the sliver of shadow beneath it where the sentinels stood just outside.

“What?” I whispered back.

“He called me,” Rémy said. “Bastien called me on what I believe is a burner. Before Father even got the news about the clothes.”

My whole body went still.

“What?”

“He’s alive,” Rémy breathed, so quiet I had to lean in to catch it. “He escaped, Margo. He said he got out. He called it hell, whatever life he ahd lived here. Whatever happened to him here. He didn’t tell me everything, just that he was safe and that he wasn’t coming back and that he hoped that I kept it a secret too. But I just thought you should know.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or sob, so I did both at once, the sound tearing out of me in some ugly, overwhelming combination that made Rémy’s eyes widen with alarm before he understood.

“He’s alive,” I repeated, like saying it again might make it more real. “He’s actually alive.”

“He’s alive,” Rémy confirmed, and something in his own composure cracked slightly now that he’d said it out loud, relief bleeding through the careful calm he’d been holding since he walked in.

I wiped at my face, laughing through tears that hadn’t fully stopped, and then the second half of what he’d said actually landed.

He wasn’t coming back.

I looked up at Rémy, and the implication of that settled slowly, heavily, into the space between us.

“That means,” I said, my voice catching, “you’ll be Alpha.”

Rémy didn’t answer right away.

He’d always been the carefree one, the spare who’d never had to carry the weight the heir carried, free to laugh at family dinners and skip council meetings and generally exist without the constant pressure that had shaped Bastien into something sharper, more careful. I wondered, watching his face now, whether that freedom had ever actually felt like freedom to him, or whether it had felt like something else entirely.

“I know,” he said finally.

“Are you okay with that?”

He was quiet for a long moment, his fingers picking absently at a loose thread in the carpet, the same one I’d worried about earlier.

“I don’t mind it,” he said.