Claimed by the scarred Alpha

CÉLINE

It had worked.

That thought pressed against my ribs as my father’s voice sliced through the corridor, Théodore’s name delivered with the same cold finality he reserved for decisions he wanted the whole house to feel. I had sown my intentions with meticulous care over dinner, nurturing his paranoia in measured doses. A word slipped in. A pause held just long enough. The delicate craft of dressing malice in the costume of concern.

He had done the rest himself.

That was the exquisite part. The finest manipulation never wore its true face. It resembled a dutiful daughter noticing what her father overlooked. It wore the mask of worry. It borrowed the shape of loyalty. And my father, even as his mind frayed at the edges, still answered to those signals as he always had, with the unthinking command of a man convinced his instincts could never fail him.

I lingered in the corridor, letting his footsteps dissolve into silence, and felt a sharp, icy ecstasy surge through me.

But then I remembered... I had one week.

Then the ecstasy soured, creeping in at the edges.

One week. After years spent constructing my authority with painstaking patience, this was what he offered: a single week. Not a reward, but a punishment for Étienne, a gift that was never meant for me. It was a consequence disguised as an opportunity. My father had finally handed me what I had longed for, but only to chastise someone else.

It settled in my gut, heavy and unyielding.

He had always been able to hand me this. Every time I had asked, every time I had positioned myself and demonstrated capability and made myself indispensable in quiet ways he never acknowledged, the answer had been some variation of no. Not yet. Not appropriate. Not a woman’s place. And now, in a flash of petulant Alpha pride, he handed it over like it cost him nothing.

Because for him, it cost nothing. That truth was what churned my stomach most.

I was never worth the role in his eyes. That had always been the silent truth. He confirmed it in the most humiliating way, revealing that what I craved had always been within reach, withheld only because he never imagined offering it to me.

Then Étienne had stood there giving me advice.

Big brother advice. Earnest and careful and delivered with the genuine concern of someone who believed he had a right to it. He had looked at me with those eyes and said the words, and there had been a moment where I had almost felt it, the particular pull of having someone in your corner who actually knew you.

Almost.

Did he truly believe he was Theodore? Not in a delusional sense—I understood the machinery of my father, Alpha Dorian’s design. But in the lived, breathing moment, as he stood in that corridor offering counsel, had some part of him begun to believe the role belonged to him?

The idea was both mesmerizing and quietly repulsive.

He was not my brother. He was a rogue who had fought his way to power through grief, rage, and the raw desperation of someone with nothing left. I respected that, in the way you respect a threat. But he was not Theodore, and his advice was not Theodore’s. I would not let the theater of family dull the edge I needed to keep.

I would not let this fraud cause me to let my guard down.

The dining room drained of people. The Beaumont girl left first, her face set in that familiar mask of willpower, and Étienne followed with the restless urgency of someone who had abandoned all pretense of indifference. Laurent lingered with the Beaumont guests, his focus scattered in ways that would keep him busy.

I had intended to talk to him and rub it in his stupid face that he would be serving me in place of that fraud, but he seemed busy with the guest, so I just decided to go to bed.

My room welcomed me with the hush of late evening. I sat at my desk and opened my journal, because some truths only become real once they are written.

I have it.

I wrote the words first and watched the ink settle into the page.

It is not enough.

It is not what I deserve.

Most irritating of all, he gave it to me for reasons that have nothing to do with me.

I keep returning to that thought. Not because I am surprised by it, but because I cannot stop examining it from every angle, searching for something I may have missed.

For years, I asked for opportunities to prove myself. I presented arguments. I demonstrated competence. I made myself useful. Every refusal came wrapped in some practical justification that was apparently convincing enough for everyone except me.

Now I know the truth.

There was never any obstacle standing in the way. There was never some threshold I needed to cross before he could trust me with responsibility. The authority was his to give all along.

He simply never considered giving it to me.

That should make this easier.

It should free me from wanting anything from him.

Instead, I find myself wondering whether he will be watching this week closely enough to notice what happens.

I disliked that thought.

I disliked it even more because I could not honestly claim that his opinion meant nothing to me.

I shook my head and kept writing.

In seven days, I will succeed.

I crossed out the sentence almost as soon as I wrote it.

In seven days, I must succeed.

That was closer to the truth.

Failure was not an option I could afford to entertain, not because my father would be insufferable about it, though he certainly would, but because it would hand him exactly what he had spent years implying. Proof. Vindication. An excuse to dismiss every argument I had ever made.

I would rather choke on my pride than give him that.

I wrote longer than I meant to. Plans unfurled in sentences and lists, the pleasure of ambition crystallizing into action. When I finally set the pen aside, my hand throbbed with a satisfying ache.

I closed the journal.

When I glanced up into the dresser mirror, someone stood behind me.

Shock jolted through me so quickly that I was already turning before my mind caught up, my body moving on instinct. I spun around.

Nothing.

The room behind me was empty. The door shut. The curtains were unmoving.

Slowly, I turned back to the mirror.

It was empty. All I had was just my own reflection looking back at me with slightly widened eyes and the flush of adrenaline still visible at my throat.

I pressed my palm to my chest, feeling my heart hammering beneath it. I sat, breathing slow and measured, until the rhythm calmed.

Perhaps it was just a trick of the lamp light. Exhaustion, too, and a day that had cost considerably more than I had budgeted for.

I washed my face at the basin, studying my reflection with the wary focus of someone unwilling to admit they had scared themselves. The cold water steadied me. I dried my face, changed, slipped into bed, and closed my eyes.

Sleep hovered out of reach. My mind raced through the coming week, the choices I would make, the precedents I would set, the ways I would prove in seven days what my father had ignored for longer than months.

Eventually, the thoughts slowed.

My breathing deepened.

I floated toward the threshold of sleep.

For some reason, though, I did not descend any deeper, which caused me to open my eyes.

Legs hung above my face.

I lurched backward so violently that my shoulders hit the headboard, and I stared upward with my heart exploding in my chest, and I saw him.

A body hung above me, suspended from a rope that vanished into the darkness beyond my sight, and the moment my eyes found it, every thought inside my head seemed to collapse into blind, animal panic.

The neck had been broken by the drop.

I knew it immediately.

There was a particular wrongness to it, a terrible angle that no living body could sustain, as though the head had become an object carelessly attached to the rest of him rather than a part of him. The corpse rotated slowly in the darkness, turning with such agonizing slowness that I found myself silently begging it to stop before I saw the face.

It did not stop.

The face remained hidden for another second, then another, forcing me to watch as it emerged piece by piece from the darkness.

The curve of a cheek.

The line of a jaw.

An eye.

Theodore.

The realization struck me with enough force to blur my vision.

His skin possessed the unnatural pallor of something that had spent too long beyond the reach of warmth, and the bruising around his throat spread beneath the rope in ugly shades of black and purple. One side of his face appeared slightly lower than the other, as though the damage done to his neck had altered the structure beneath the skin.

Then he smiled.

The expression appeared gradually, not with the natural movement of a living face, but with the dreadful inevitability of a crack spreading through glass. The corners of his mouth stretched wider and wider while his eyes remained fixed on me with a terrible and unwavering focus, and I became aware of a faint sound that seemed to accompany the movement, something soft and damp that made my stomach turn.

What horrified me most was not the broken neck, nor the bruising, nor even the smile.

It was the certainty that he was looking directly at me.

Not through me.

Not in my direction.

At me.

His gaze carried the awful patience of something that had been waiting a very long time for this moment and knew with absolute confidence that I could not escape it.

"What is wrong, sister?" It was Theodore’s voice. It was Theodore’s face, distorted and wrong. "Is this not what you fantasized about?"