Dumped By The Alpha, I Married His Stepbrother

Six

Morning came in through a gap in the blinds, thin and gray, and I lay there for a long time before I let myself move, memorizing the ceiling the same way I had memorized my own face the night before. Somewhere down the hall, a cart wheel squeaked against tile. Somewhere closer, my own heartbeat filled the silence like something trying to talk me out of what I'd already agreed to.

Corinne came in a little after seven, clipboard in hand, her expression giving away nothing.

"You slept?"

"Some."

"Good. You'll want whatever rest you got. This will take most of the day."

Two orderlies wheeled a gurney in behind her, and my stomach dropped the way it had the moment the anesthesiologist first counted me down the night before, except this time there was no anesthesia yet, just the slow, deliberate approach of something irreversible.

"Once we begin," Corinne said, checking the line already in my arm, "there's no pausing halfway through to ask if you've changed your mind. I need you certain."

"I'm certain."

"Say it again. For the record."

I thought of Caleb's voice through that bedroom door, warm and easy, telling my stepsister that touching me felt like something he tolerated for money. I thought of Evelyn's hand cracking across my cheek and three maids watching me bleed onto marble and saying nothing.

"I'm certain," I said. "Take it all. Every part of the face he ever touched."

Something flickered in Corinne's expression, something almost like sympathy, gone before it could settle into anything softer. She nodded once and signaled the orderlies forward.

Lucien was waiting by the surgical wing doors when they wheeled me past. He didn't say anything encouraging. He didn't reach for my hand the way people do in the moments before something frightening, the way Caleb used to, back when his gestures still meant something to me. He simply looked at me, steady, the way he'd looked at me since the moment I woke up in that hospital bed a stranger to my own life.

"When you wake up," he said, "you won't recognize yourself. I need you to understand that going in, not after."

"I already understand that."

"Understanding it and living it aren't the same thing."

The doors swung shut between us before I could answer.

The last thing I remembered was counting backward, the ceiling tiles blurring into long white streaks, and then nothing at all.

When I surfaced again, hours had passed. My whole face throbbed with a deep, foreign ache, like something had been taken apart and reassembled slightly wrong, bone by bone. I tried to lift my hand toward it and a firm grip caught my wrist before I got there.

"Not yet," a voice said. Young. Unfamiliar. "The grafts need three days before anyone touches them, including you."

"How did it go?"

"Exactly as planned. Mr. De Villiers asked to be present when you're ready to see the results. He wants to explain some of it himself."

I lay there through the rest of the afternoon, drifting in and out, the pain dulling slightly with each dose the nurses fed into my line. Every time I woke, I found myself running my tongue along the inside of my mouth, testing the unfamiliar shape of my own jaw, terrified and strangely fascinated by how foreign it already felt.

Lucien came in as evening settled outside the window, Corinne trailing behind him with a small hand mirror pressed against her chest like something that needed careful handling.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Like I've been rebuilt out of someone else's spare parts."

"You have been." He said it without any softness, the way he said most things, but there was something careful in the way he watched me, gauging how much truth I could hold at once. "Are you ready?"

"No," I said. "Show me anyway."

Corinne stepped forward and turned the mirror toward my face.

For a long moment, I didn't understand what I was looking at. The swelling was heavy, the bruising dark beneath both eyes, but underneath all of it, the bones themselves had changed completely. Higher cheekbones than I'd ever had. A straighter nose. A jaw that tapered into something sharper, more angular, entirely unfamiliar.

I touched my fingers to my lips, not my new ones, the ones I remembered, the soft curve Caleb used to trace with his thumb in the earliest, kindest year of our marriage, back when I still believed his touch meant something real.

"That's not me," I whispered.

"That's the point," Lucien said.

"I know that's the point." My voice cracked. "I didn't think it would feel like grief."

"Like what?"

"Like standing over my own grave," I said, "and realizing I'm the one who dug it."

Corinne lowered the mirror slowly, giving me a moment before speaking again. "The swelling will go down over the next two weeks. What you're seeing now isn't final. The features will sharpen as the tissue settles."

"Will I look like her? The woman in the photograph?"

"Close enough," Corinne said. "Close enough that no one who never actually met Mireille will question it."

I closed my eyes, holding the image of the stranger in the glass behind my eyelids, trying to convince myself it would eventually feel less like theft and more like armor.

"Tell me about her," I said, when I opened my eyes again. "Mireille. I want to know whose face I'm wearing before I have to wear it in front of the entire pack."

Something shuttered behind Lucien's expression, quick and deliberate, the same reaction I'd caught the night before when I'd asked the same question and been turned away.

"Not today."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true." He held my gaze, unflinching. "Some truths are heavier than others, Elena. I need you steady enough in five days to stand beside me and be introduced to an entire pack as someone you've never been. That takes precedence over satisfying your curiosity about a woman who's been dead for twenty years."

"You avoid the question every time I ask it."

"I choose when to answer it. There's a difference."

Corinne set the mirror face down on the side table without a word and gathered her things, slipping out of the room with the quiet efficiency of someone who had learned exactly when to leave a conversation before it became hers to referee.

I studied Lucien for a long moment after she left, watching the careful way he kept his expression smooth, the deliberate stillness of a man who had spent years learning to give away nothing.

"You knew her," I said. "Didn't you."

His jaw tightened, just barely, the only crack in the composure.

"You say her name like it costs you something every single time."

"Rest, Elena."

"That's not a no."

He didn't answer that either. He turned toward the door instead, and I thought, for one moment, that he might simply leave the way he had every other time I'd pushed too close to whatever he kept locked away.

Instead, his hand paused on the handle.

"There's something else you should know before tomorrow," he said, not turning around. "Chloe came back to the hospital this afternoon, while you were still under."

The words landed like ice water down my spine.

"She asked to speak with me," Lucien continued. "Alone. Not you."

"Why would she ask for you instead of me?"

"That's what I intend to find out." He finally turned, and whatever calm had been in his face a moment before was gone entirely, replaced by something sharper, more focused. "She claims to have information about Caleb. Something she says only two people currently alive would be able to confirm as true."

My pulse climbed straight into my throat. "What information?"

"She wouldn't say. Not without conditions."

"What conditions, Lucien?"

His grip tightened slightly on the door handle, and for the first time since I'd woken up in this hospital, I saw something that looked almost like hesitation pass through his eyes.

"She wants to meet me alone tonight," he said. "No guards. No witnesses. Just the two of us, and whatever she claims to know about the night your parents actually died."