Claimed by the scarred Alpha

VIVIANNE

I prayed my choices would not return to devour me.

That fear pressed against my ribs when the knock sounded at my door. I nearly ignored it; the night had already drained me past empty. The file was gone. I had released it. Whatever consequences awaited, I would meet them when they arrived.

"Who is it?"

"Luna Vivianne."

Amara’s voice, but not as I knew it. The steadiness was gone, replaced by a thinness that prickled my skin before my mind caught up.

I crossed to the door and opened it.

My brother stood behind her.

Amara trembled, the shaking beginning in her hands and rippling through her entire frame. She muttered something I could not catch until I drew close enough to hear.

"I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry."

Lucian set his hand between her shoulder blades and guided her inside. He did not need force; his presence alone usually moved people. But tonight, he chose action over threat, and the girl stumbled into my room, eyes already shining with tears.

He stepped in after her and pulled the door shut.

The latch clicked, impossibly loud in the hush.

"What is this?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.

"You know exactly what this is." He looked at me the way he always looked at me when he had caught me doing something he had decided was a betrayal. Level. Patient. Like he had all the time in the world to make his point and no particular urgency about how long it took. "I found your Omega here, trying to sneak that girl out."

"Lucian—"

"Did you genuinely think," he said, with something almost resembling amusement, "that you could outmaneuver me in my own domain? In a house you live in because of me?"

"Please." I stepped forward. "Just let this go. She is just an Omega. She is not a threat to anything you are trying to build. Let Bastien have something that belongs to him."

"Something." He tasted the word as if it were interesting. "An Omega."

"A person."

"How touching." He tilted his head. "You would think I was condemning him to death, the way you have been carrying on. You are not even his biological mother." He paused, letting that land exactly where he intended it to land. "I genuinely cannot explain why you care this much."

A new kind of silence settled over the room.

I looked at him, and I understood what he was telling me. Not with his words, which were still arranged into something that could have been interpreted as simple cruelty, but with his eyes, which were telling the truth underneath.

He would not have said that if he intended to get this over quickly. If he did not intend to shed blood.

"You don’t intend for her to live," I said.

He turned to Amara.

"No," he said simply, and his hand moved.

His fingers extended into claws mid-motion, the shift so smooth and practiced that it was finished before I processed that it had begun. The sound that came from Amara’s throat was not a scream. It was the absence of one. Blood replaced the air she tried to pull in, and she dropped to her knees, her hands coming up to her neck with the desperate instinct of someone trying to hold themselves together.

She looked at me.

Her eyes found mine and stayed there, and the look in them was not accusation. It was something worse. It was the look of someone who still believed, in the last seconds they had available, that the person they were looking at would find a way to fix this.

"No." I moved toward her and dropped down. My hands covered hers. The blood was hot and immediate. "No no no—"

"Do not be dramatic." Lucian’s voice came from somewhere above me, utterly unchanged. "Do you want to bring the whole floor down on what we have going on here?"

I pressed harder, but the blood kept flowing, indifferent to pressure, desperation, or the burden of hope.

"Luna." Amara’s voice was barely audible. "Save me."

She was looking at me. Still looking at me. And what I saw in her face was not just the plea of a dying woman but something more specific than that. A request she did not have the words for anymore, a recognition that I was the only person in this room with the standing to do something, if only I had the courage to use it.

Courage failed me.

I never had enough of it, not when it counted, not when the price would be paid by someone else.

I did not have a hidden strength I could draw on.

She did not understand.

She never could.

The people beneath always imagined we were powerful.

They imagined titles meant freedom, protection, and even control.

The truth, however, was uglier.

I was trapped too. The cage was simply larger.

Her body trembled, then weakened, then weakened more.

I felt life leaving her beneath my hands.

Slowly.

Like water slipping through my fingers. Then her hands went slack beneath mine.

I stayed there for a moment after, my palms still pressed against the wound that no longer needed holding, the warmth of her already beginning to leave.

I lowered her to the floor as blood spread beneath her.

The smell filled the room.

Then I stood.

I did not look at my brother when I spoke. "Is Bastien’s woman dead too?"

I made myself turn to face him.

The fireplace glowed behind him. He stood before it, something metallic in his hand, the firelight twisting his features into the stuff of childhood nightmares. He smiled at me.

"Wouldn’t you like to know?"

I despised him. In that moment, I truly despised him. Not feared. Not resented. I hated him.

He reached into his jacket and produced a small package. Wrapped simply, tied with a plain string. He set it on the floor in front of the fire with the casualness of a man setting down his keys after coming home, then straightened and looked at me.

"It does not matter," he said. "What matters is this." He nudged the package toward me with his foot.