Chapter 88 88
Damien POV
She had come to me first.
Out of everyone, I had been the one Geneviève ran to when she needed help. All I’d asked was for Aurélie to hold on just a few weeks while I stabilized Geneviève and dealt with the fallout. I never imagined it would spiral into something this grotesque.
Now she had admitted to orchestrating Dominique’s kidnapping.
The realization sat heavy in my chest, sickening. I couldn’t reconcile the woman I thought I knew with someone capable of something so reckless, so cruel. And worse who had she been giving orders to? It wasn’t my men. That much I knew. Which meant she had access to someone else. Someone I hadn’t seen coming.
Geneviève had always acted before thinking. Even when we were together, I’d had to drag her out of more than a few disasters she’d created herself. But this? To repay me by deliberately endangering my wife and my child?
The image slammed into me without warning Aurélie’s body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
A shudder ran through me.
How could she be so cold? So heartless?
I remembered the scream. The way my instincts had taken over as I rushed toward the sound. Aurélie had already been unconscious by the time I reached her. Geneviève had been screaming too, calling my name, begging for help. I hadn’t thought I’d reacted to the voice that reached me first.
And Aurélie had seen that as rejection.
A rejection so deep it drove her to flee. To lie. To leave with my unborn children to protect them from me.
Maybe I had become my father after all.
At least, that was how she saw me.
Now Aurélie wanted to face Geneviève herself but that wasn’t going to happen. Not near her. Not near the twins.
Geneviève needed to answer for what she’d done.
“I’ll speak to her,” I said flatly, making it clear there would be no argument.
“I’m more than capable”
“I’m not questioning that,” I cut in. “But this is my pack. I’m the Alpha here. I’ll find out what she intended, and then we’ll decide what comes next.”
I’d ordered Geneviève placed in the holding cells deliberately. I didn’t want unrest rippling through the pack not until I understood the full scope of what she’d done.
She was isolated. Solitary confinement. Two guards on her at all times.
As I approached her cell, the men on duty bowed their necks instinctively. Lucas had paired a seasoned warrior with a newly trained one the younger couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Smart call.
Without a word, I made my intent known. They opened the cell and dragged a chair inside for me.
Geneviève lay on the narrow bed, facing the wall, curled in on herself. Legs drawn up. Small. Fragile.
Innocent.
The sight punched the breath from my lungs not because I believed it, but because I was finally realizing just how deeply I’d been played. How easily she’d worn that mask. How willing I’d been to believe it.
“I know you’re awake,” I said coldly. “Tell me everything.”
She wasn’t pack, but she still felt the weight of my command. I was the Alpha King. Only Aurélie’s aura had ever rivaled mine.
“I did it for you,” she said quickly. “For us. I thought it would be a simple exchange. The child returned, the Darkvale alliance dissolved.” She turned toward me then, eyes swollen and red, fingers twisting the hem of her top. “I didn’t know it was her. I didn’t know she was alive or that she was Alpha. How could I? You told me you saw the flames yourself.”
“Did you push her down the stairs,” I asked slowly, deliberately, “knowing she was pregnant?”
Every word was measured. This mattered.
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
“We were arguing. She was rushing past me. I—I lost my balance. I could’ve reached for her to steady myself”
She stopped short as a growl tore from my chest.
That was all the answer I needed.
So this was who she was.
Or maybe she always had been and I’d been too young, too infatuated, too blind to see the cracks beneath the surface.
“She was upset about you finding out she was pregnant,” Geneviève rushed on. “Yes I remember now. Fabrice told me. I threatened to tell you first”
Rage detonated inside me.
“My children,” I roared. “They are my children. Enough lies.”
I stood, my aura flooding the cell.
“You will remain here until I decide what to do with you.”
And for the first time since this nightmare began, I felt absolutely certain of one thing:
She would not walk away from this.