Chapter 274: Venom

ÉTIENNE

"I want to be there," I insisted, before Dorian could finish turning back toward his desk.

He paused, one hand resting against the edge of it.

"Étienne—"

"I know what you said," I cut in. "But she’s my sister too, whatever else that word carries between us now. I’ve watched this family carry its wounds in silence for years. I’d rather stand in that room and witness whatever happens than hear about it secondhand afterward."

Dorian studied me for a long moment, weighing something behind his tired eyes.

"If you insist," he said finally.

An hour later, we sat side by side in the elder’s circle, the stone chamber cold despite the number of bodies now crowded into it. Part of me believed word had clearly spread faster than either of us anticipated, because every seat along the gallery had filled, faces I recognized and plenty I didn’t, all of them hungry for whatever spectacle was about to unfold.

Céline stood in the center, chains looped loosely around her wrists, more ceremonial than functional given how thoroughly her dignity had already been stripped for the proceeding. She held herself upright anyway, chin lifted, refusing to give the room the satisfaction of watching her cower.

The elder presiding read the charges aloud. Poisoning her own father, slowly and deliberately, over the course of years. Complicity in her brother Theodore’s death. Conspiracy against the ruling line of Valcourt.

"How do you plead?" the elder asked.

Céline’s laugh cut through the chamber, sharp and entirely without warmth.

"I did all of it," she said. "Every single charge. And I feel no remorse whatsoever, if begging is what this room actually wants from me."

A murmur rippled through the gallery.

She turned toward her father, Alpha Dorian, her eyes finding him with a precision that told me she’d been waiting for this exact moment for longer than any of us realized.

"I hope they hang me," she said. "Or take my head clean off. I want you to sit with that for the rest of your life, Father. Knowing you were a useless parent who lost both his children by his own hand." Her voice dropped, venomous and quiet enough that the whole room leaned in to catch it. "I hope it hurts. I truly do."

Dorian’s face went pale, something raw and wounded flashing across it before he forced his expression back into something neutral.

Céline turned toward me next.

"And you," she said, tilting her head, something almost amused replacing the venom for a moment. "Imposter. I’ll be watching from whatever grave they put me in, curious to see if you ever manage happiness." Her mouth curved into something ugly. "Though half of me already knows how you end up. Given how thoroughly fucked your life has been, I’d wager you put a bullet through your own skull eventually. Your revenge will never be enough to wash out the stain those men and women left on your body. On your soul."

I didn’t react.

I understood exactly what she was doing, throwing every knife she had left in one final volley, desperate for some flicker of pain crossing my face before they dragged her out of this room for good and end her life like she believed was going to happen. I refused to give it to her.

The elders conferred quietly among themselves, murmurs passing back and forth behind raised hands, and just as the presiding elder rose to deliver their sentence, Dorian stood.

"I wish to speak," he said.

The room quieted.

The presiding elder gestured for him to continue, and Dorian turned, not toward the elders, but toward his daughter, standing chained in the center of the chamber.

"She did poison me," he said, his voice carrying clearly through the silence. "She gave me my pills and fucked them all over. I sat across from her at meals for years, entirely unaware that every dish she prepared with her own hands, every helpshe rendered was killing me by degrees." He paused, something raw bleeding into his composure. "She also played a hand in the death of my son and her brother, Theodore."

He looked back at the elders.

"Nothing I say changes any of that," he continued. "Nothing excuses it. I am not asking this council to forget her crimes, or to pretend they carry less weight than they do."

He turned back to Céline.

"But she is still my daughter," he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the word, the first real fracture I’d seen in him since this entire ordeal began. "Whatever she has done, whatever poison ran through her actions these past years, I raised her. I failed her somewhere along the way, in ways I am only now beginning to understand, and I cannot in good conscience stand here and ask for her death without acknowledging that failure as partly my own."

Céline’s expression flickered, something almost startled crossing her face before she smoothed it back into contempt.

"I don’t want your pity," she spat.

Dorian ignored her.

"I ask this council for mercy," he said. "Not forgiveness or restoration. Mercy. Let her live, even if living means losing everything that made her who she was in these halls."

The presiding elder studied him for a long moment before turning back to confer with the others, their voices dropping low again, the debate stretching on longer than I expected.

Finally, the elder rose.

"Céline Valcourt," he said, "this council finds you guilty on all charges."

Céline’s chin lifted higher, bracing herself.

"For your crimes," the elder continued, "this council sentences you to permanent exile. Stripped of your rank, of bloodline privilege, of any future claim to power within Valcourt or any pack bound by treaty to it. You will leave these territory as a rogue, and you will never return."

Silence swallowed the chamber.

Céline’s composure shattered.

"No," she said, her voice climbing. "No, that’s not— you’re supposed to kill me. I confessed. I told you I wanted death. Give me death."

"The council has spoken," the elder said, unmoved.

"No!" Céline’s chains rattled as she lunged forward, sentinels immediately closing in to restrain her. "You cannot do this to me. A rogue? You’re condemning me to nothing. To less than nothing. I would rather die than live as some nameless, powerless creature begging scraps from packs that will spit on me the second they learn what I now am."

I watched her unravel in real time, everything she’d walked in with, the cold defiance, the venom, the carefully constructed contempt, all of it cracking apart under the weight of a sentence she clearly hadn’t prepared herself to survive.

"Father," she said, twisting toward Dorian as the sentinels dragged her back. "Father, tell them. Tell them I’d rather die. Please."

Dorian didn’t answer.

He simply watched her, something unbearably heavy in his expression, grief and guilt and something that might have still been love tangled together in a way I understood better now than I ever had before, given everything I’d just watched him do for me only hours earlier.

"This is worse," Céline screamed, her voice tearing raw as they hauled her toward the chamber doors. "This is so much worse than death, and you know it. You did this on purpose. You want me to suffer!"

The doors closed behind her, muffling whatever she screamed next.

Dorian remained standing for a long moment, staring at the space where his daughter had been, before finally sinking back down into his seat beside me.

"Was that mercy," he asked quietly, not really looking for an answer, "or was that its own kind of cruelty?"

I thought about my own years as a rogue, stripped of name and rank and every certainty I’d once taken for granted, wandering without a pack, without protection, without anyone left who cared whether I lived or died. In a sex trafficking ring too.

"I don’t know," I said honestly. "I survived it. But I’m not sure my surviving and living are going to be anything like hers."

Dorian nodded slowly, his eyes still fixed on the closed doors.

"Neither am I," he said.