Hearing the little break in his tone at the wordbrother, my chest squeezed, and I hugged him tighter, trying to merge our bodies and offer him warmth and comfort. Telling him I was here.
He sucked in a breath and looked away, lips thin. “Before the rebellion erupted, I was striking deals with human companies to bring profit to our pack. It’s not unheard of for Otherborne to do business with humans, as long as they kept their true nature under wraps, but werewolves hardly ever did such things. We’re very homogenous. We don’t mix with other Otherborne races, let alone humans. I was the odd one out; I insisted we couldn’t continue living among ourselves without spreading out to other races. Jacques, along with other conservative pack members, did not like that at all.”
Slowly, his arms fell from around me, and he took a step back, staring at me without really seeing me. “I was an idealist. Still am, for better and for worse. But back then, I turned a deaf ear to others’ opinions. Instead of listening, I preached. And Jacques and the others simply stopped complaining when they realized they were talking to a wall.”
The self-deprecation, and self-loathing, in his voice made my heart break. I stepped forward, wanting to reach out to him again, to hold him, but he shook his head and put up his hand. “No, Drew. I don’t deserve your sympathy. The fall of theMontvoilépack was of my own making.”
“Lucien—”
“Yet I could’ve prevented it,” he cut me off with a bitter smile, “if only I could have told the human companies and their representatives, who became my friends along the way, about what was happening.”
Pushing his auburn curls back, he gave me a desperate look. “You must understand, Drew. I wasn’t entirely unaware of my pack members’ building resentment. I saw things from a different perspective, my own perspective, really, and wouldn’t bother to try and look at everything from theirs. For so long, Otherborne and werewolves, too, thought humans to be weak, meek, and useless. But when I dealt with them myself and interacted with them on a daily basis, I realized just howwrong this state of mind was.” His voice turned somewhat choked. “Humans had their own strength. They had the power of curiosity, the endless need to better themselves, unlike most Otherborne, especially werewolves, who believed that they could only use the cards life had dealt them at birth.”
He suddenly looked as if all energy evaporated from his body as he sat down on a bench, burying his head in his hands. “But just like I didn’t listen to them, my pack members didn’t listen to me. And so one fateful night, while I was away, in Marseille for a meeting with a human company, a rebellion broke out inside my pack and started a civil war.”
Tears welled in my eyes as I slowly, hesitantly, came to sit next to him. I was scared of what he was going to tell me next.
“Jacques led the rebellion,” Lucien said hoarsely, and I saw him tremble. “He brought half of the pack over to his side, and they went around the pack territory, threatening the members with death if they didn’t join them. A few did, but most didn’t, and the forests of Paris turned into battlefields.”
He stopped, and I could hear him trying to catch his breath before he said, “I received the call too late, and ran in wolf form all the way from Marseille to Paris without pause for a full day at full speed. But by the time I arrived, I was already too late.
“They were all dead.”
I sucked in a breath as he slowly raised his head and turned to look at me with that haunted gaze from before. “When werewolves turn against each other, the odds of survival of either side are close to zero. The entire pack territory was filled with bodies of werewolves in both human and wolf form. My family ...” He swallowed hard and looked away. “I had a mother and two younger sisters, just like you did, Drew. And I failed to protect them. I arrived too late. The rebellion killed them.”
He was trembling so hard, I couldn’t help but hug him again. I didn’t care if he didn’t want to; he needed to be held. And I needed to hold him, too, because I’d never seen him like this before, never heard him as broken.“Lucien,” I whispered, tears escaping my eyes as I cradled his head close to my chest, “you don’t have to ... you don’t have to c-continue—”
“I was animbécile,” he hissed as he let me hug him, though his arms remained at his sides. “For trusting that my pack was like family to me. That they would never dare cross that line. I had put faith and trust in them, inJacques, and now I will have to suffer the consequences of my naivety for the rest of my life.”
I was about to object, to deny all that, to tell him he was not animbécilefor trusting the wrong people, but before I could, he suddenly raised his head and met my gaze, his own tears wetting his bristles. “Before then, I had never killed,” he whispered, his tears falling freely. “I hadn’t had any reason to. But when I saw the bodies of my mother and sisters, I felt rage like I had never felt before. I saw red. And I, along with my sole surviving Beta, who was on my side, who was a true brother to me, unlike Jacques, went hunting.”
He shook his head, looking away. “I killed and killed until all I could smell was that metallic stench of blood. But no matter how many disloyal pack members I killed, no matter the dark retribution I felt by ending Jacques’s life, my slaughtered pack members would never come back.”
The betrayal he’d described, the gravity of the situation, of everything he was telling me, made me sob. I realized, now, why he killed Mack Page, almost emotionlessly. Why he thought himself an idiot for trusting another Beta after Jacques’s betrayal.
“Only two members of the pack survived,” Lucien said now in a hollow voice, leaning back from me and staring at the ground, unseeing. “Rémi, my cousin, though he was no longer a part of the pack ever since he moved to the States as a child, and Blaise, the only Beta who survived the attack and never left my side.
“After theMontvoilépack’s demise, Blaise and I stayed with a human family,” he continued, and his tears dried as his face grew fierce with a frustrated kind of affection. “It was the family of a man I met during my business with humans, and who became a true friend. Hisname is Olivier. Both he and his wife, Martha, are human. They shared the hobby of hunting. When my pack slaughtered each other, Olivier and his wife were caught in the cross fire while on a hunting trip. I found them wounded in the aftermath. Olivier, who’s ex-military, injured many of the pack members I fought, and inadvertently helped me and Blaise in our scourge.”
Lucien turned to meet my gaze fully now. “It made me realize that maybe, if only humans knew of our existence, they could’ve come and helped my pack members when I was away, just like Olivier and Martha did. What if so many atrocities that happened to Otherborne could’ve been prevented by getting help from humans?”
He cupped my face suddenly, tracing my cheeks with his thumbs. “Like when you helped me when I was on the verge of death.”
My heart broke at his words, and at his touch too. It reminded me of the conversation we’d had only an hour ago, about my emotions being manipulated as his Eteria. How selfish he felt for finding me and keeping me close despite everything he knew. The kiss ...
“What happened to them?” I asked in a whisper, focusing on his story. His words. “To Olivier and Martha.”
His hands slid down from my face and held my own. He stared at my palms, almost studying them. “The French equivalent to the American Supernatural Society called it a breach of protocol, and much like Chase, the sorcerer, almost did to you, they erased the couple’s memories.”
He grew quiet then, and I did too. For a few long seconds, neither of us said anything as we held each other’s hands, as though trying to comfort and console one another. I felt raw and bleeding on the inside, and could only imagine how Lucien felt.
“I promised I would never let something like that happen again.” He suddenly spoke, breaking the silence, and caught my gaze. His eyes almost pleading with me to believe him. “When I was offered the position of an Alpha here in California, I promised that I would always be there for my pack members. That I would never be far. That I would take care of them.”
I nodded, leaning my forehead against his. “I know. I believe you.”
“Yet Kate was afflicted by Wildlight only four months into my job,” he said in a strained voice, “and I was blindsided and betrayed, yet again, by a Beta of my choosing. And now, one of the very few pack members I truly trust ... Anaïs ...”
His voice trailed off, and he pulled me close, burying his face in my neck and holding me tight. I held him just as tightly back. No more words were needed. I understood everything now.