Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

"The initial readings were a mess," the head healer said, holding the folder open between us. "We could not make sense of it at first. Too many overlapping markers, things that should not coexist in a single sample at all."

"In plain terms," I said. "Walk me through what you actually found, not how confused you were getting there."

He nodded, adjusting his approach. "When we first ran the sample, it looked like noise. Garbage data, essentially, the kind of result you get from contamination or degraded material. That is what I assumed initially." He tapped the page. "But the pattern of the noise interested me. It was not random. It had structure to it, just structure I did not recognize as belonging to a single source."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I started looking at it as though it were two sets of DNA pressed together rather than one corrupted sample." He flipped to a second page covered in dense charts. "Once I approached it that way, I could begin separating the strands. Splicing them apart, essentially, the same way you might pull two tangled threads apart if you worked at it slowly enough."

"And."

"And it worked." Something like genuine excitement crossed his face despite the gravity of the circumstances. "Once separated, I had two distinct profiles instead of one unreadable mess. The first profile remains difficult. Fragmented in ways I have never encountered, possibly something entirely outside standard classification. I cannot tell you yet what that one belongs to."

"And the second."

"The second I could read clearly." He turned the folder fully toward me. "Half wolf. The remaining half carries markers consistent with witch bloodlines, though there is a third component layered in that I cannot fully classify yet, either. Something additional. Something I do not have a clean comparison for in our records."

"So whoever this is," I said slowly, working through it myself now, "is not simply wolf. Not simply witch."

"A hybrid," he confirmed. "Of at least two things, possibly three. Wolf, witch, and something I have not identified."

Séverine’s voice cut through from the cot behind me, sharper than I expected, given her condition. "What is that? Are you talking about me?"

I turned toward her. "No. This is about the witch situation."

"We already have the witch." Her jaw was tight, her eyes glassy with exhaustion, she was clearly fighting to push through. "Prim."

"There was also a man," I said. "The one Margaux encountered in the corridor before any of this started."

"I am sure a witch can shapeshift," she said, dismissively, looking away from me toward the wall.

"Run it against everything in the medical database," I told the healer. "Every recorded profile we have access to, current staff, past staff, anyone who has ever set foot on this estate long enough to have records taken."

"I have already started the comparison."

I turned back to Séverine.

She had gone pale, her face drained of color in a way that had nothing to do with our earlier conversation and everything to do with exhaustion her body had not finished recovering from. The bandaging on her hand looked stark against how white the rest of her skin had become.

"You need to rest," I said.

"We mean nothing to each other." Her voice came out flat, cutting. "So you do not get to tell me what to do anymore."

She reached for the IV line in her arm and tore it free in one sharp motion, wincing as she did.

"I do not think that is smart," I said, stepping toward her. "You are still not stable."

"I am leaving this estate." She swung her legs off the cot, unsteady but determined, refusing to look at me directly. "My grandfather’s healers are perfectly competent. More than competent. And there, people actually care about whether I live or die. No one is trying to kill me in my own bedroom there."

"Séverine—"

"I wish you and your wife the absolute best." The word wife came out laced with everything bitter she had left in her. "Now leave me alone."

She pushed past me, her shoulder catching mine hard enough to register, and crossed to the door. She pulled it open and slammed it shut behind her with enough force that the sound echoed down the corridor.

I stood there for a long moment.

"Is there a sentinel posted nearby?" I said, finally, my voice rough.

One appeared in the doorway almost immediately, having clearly heard the commotion from his post outside.

"Watch her," I said. "Make sure she does not leave the estate grounds in her current condition, but do not restrain her unless absolutely necessary. Give her the room she is asking for."

He bowed and left.

I stood alone in the infirmary, the head healer already absorbed back into his files, running comparisons against a database that might or might not give us anything useful.

She might be hurt, my wolf said quietly, the first thing he had offered since the confrontation began. But you did the right thing tonight.

I did not feel like I had done the right thing.

I felt like I had taken something fragile that had been mine to protect for years and let it shatter on the floor in front of me, and the only thing I could tell myself in the aftermath was that it had needed to happen eventually, that prolonging it further would only have deepened the wound rather than letting it begin closing properly.

It did not make the sound of that door slamming any easier to carry.

I was going to head out myself when the head healer’s voice trapped me in place.

"There was something I forgot to mention," he said.

I turned and saw him half-walking, half-running in my direction. "What?"

"After I got the split DNA, given what happened to Luna Séverine, I ran a comparison against Prim. My thinking was she might have an unacknowledged sibling we did not have in our records, someone who could explain the wolf markers in that second profile while she herself presented as a werewolf." He paused. "But there was no match."

"Meaning."

"The other person is not her brother, as I hoped. But... that led me elsewhere."

"Go on."

"I went further. I pulled her own sample directly, the one we have on file from when she was processed into staff." He met my eyes. "It came back as pure Omega genetics. No wolf hybridization. No witch markers. Nothing matching either profile."

I stood there for a moment, letting that settle.

"What are you implying?" I said.

"I think you already know, Alpha."

Prim was innocent?