Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LUCIAN

My sister’s voice came through the phone speaker before Margaux ended the call, and I had been listening from the other room with the particular attentiveness I reserved for conversations that were not meant for my ears.

Sometimes I see things. People who are not supposed to be there. Dead people. And these threads.

I set down the report I had been reading and crossed to my study without conscious decision, my feet carrying me there on instinct alone. I went to the shelf in the corner, the one with the false panel behind the third row of ledgers, and pulled three leather-bound diaries from where they had sat undisturbed for several years now.

I had not opened them since the funeral.

I sat at my desk and turned through the pages slowly, my sister’s handwriting growing more erratic as the entries progressed toward the end, until I found the one I had been searching for without fully admitting to myself that I was searching.

I am seeing things. I feel like I am going crazy. What are these threads? What are these shadow people? Ghosts? I don’t want to go to a madhouse. Who can I talk to? Who can I tell?

I stared at the page for a long moment.

"Seems like craziness does not skip even a generation," I said to the empty room.

The memory came uninvited, the way memories of that particular night always did, arriving whole and complete rather than fading at the edges the way most memories eventually did with time.

***

"They have no real claim to contest us," the sentinel said, sliding the property documents across my desk. "Three generations on that land, but the original grant was never properly filed with the pack registry. A technicality, but a technicality is all we need."

"And if they appeal to Armand directly?"

"Armand does not concern himself with border disputes this small. He will defer to your judgment, same as always."

I smiled at that. Small disputes were the easiest kind. The family in question had perhaps forty acres bordering the eastern creek, decent soil, a modest farmhouse that had been theirs for longer than my own family had held any land at all. None of that mattered. What mattered was that the creek access would let me expand the distillery operation I had been quietly building for the past two years, and a family with no political weight and no legal standing was not an obstacle worth respecting.

"Draft the seizure notice," I said. "Give them thirty days to vacate. Generous, considering we owe them nothing."

"Some will say thirty days is not generous at all."

"Some will say a great many things." I did not look up from the map spread across my desk, already tracing the boundary lines I intended to redraw. "None of them sign my ledgers."

He almost smiled at that, the particular smile of a man who had learned exactly which jokes I found amusing and made sure to supply them on schedule.

"There is also the matter of the well," he said. "It sits technically on their side of the original boundary, but if we redraw using the creek as the new marker—"

"Then it sits on our side." I waved a hand. "Make it so."

That was when the door opened.

Vivianne walked in, and whatever satisfaction I had been feeling about the well and the boundary line and the next two years of distillery profits evaporated the moment I looked at her properly.

She looked like death.

That was the only honest way to describe her appearance. Pale beyond her usual coloring, her hair unkempt in a way I had never once seen from her, her eyes carrying the particular hollow exhaustion of someone who had not slept properly in days.

"We need to talk," she said.

"Go see the healer," I said, not looking up fully from the documents and maps in front of me. "You look terrible. Do not play with your health, Vivianne. Or better yet, go back to Beaumont and rest properly." I glanced up at her then, really looked at her. "Or are you pregnant?"

"I am not pregnant." Her voice came out flat. "Three children are more than enough for one lifetime."

"Then what?"

"We need to talk. Now."

"What could we possibly need to discuss tonight that cannot wait until morning?"

She did not answer that directly. I noticed, somewhere in the back of my mind that was still half occupied with the land seizure mental paperwork, that she looked afraid. Genuinely afraid, in a way I had rarely seen from her, even during the worst of our childhood.

She crossed the room toward me and toward the sentinel standing at my side.

"Morning is too late," she said.

Then her hand moved.

She pulled the gun from my sentinel’s hip holster before either of us fully registered what was happening, and the weapon was against her own temple before the sentinel could close the distance to stop her.

"Vivianne." I stood so fast my chair scraped back hard against the floor. "What are you doing?"

The sentinel lunged.

"Do not," I said, sharper than I had ever spoken to him before. "Do not touch her."

He froze with his hand halfway extended.

"I am listening now," I said, turning back to my sister, keeping my voice as level as I could manage given the circumstances. "I am listening. You do not need to do this for my attention."

"This is the only way you would ever actually listen." Her voice came out steady despite the gun pressed against her own skin. "You never listen, Lucian. You are so consumed by your own ambitions that you cannot see anyone else’s pain even when it is standing directly in front of you."

"I am listening right now."

"Lucian." Her hand did not waver. "I have to die."

"What?" Something cold moved through my chest. "No. Absolutely not. I am listening. You do not have to go this far."

"You have no idea what I have been through." Her voice cracked slightly. "I thought I could outsmart it. I thought using Isabelle would protect everyone. But it has been plotting this whole time, and I have to stop it before it takes what it actually wants."

"I can protect you." I kept my voice as calm as I could force it to be. "Whatever this is. Lay it on me. I will handle it. It is your big brother, Lucian. When have I ever failed you?"

"You cannot handle this one." She shook her head slowly. "I tricked it, Lucian. And it wants blood for that."

"What wants blood? What are you talking about?"

"I never told you this. Or Isabelle, because of how she would react." She took a breath that shook visibly. "There is something wrong with me. There has been for a long time. I thought I was losing my mind, but it is more than that." She paused. "I am a whisperer."

"What does that even mean?"

"I do not entirely know. Psychic? Witch? I genuinely do not have the right word for it." Her grip on the gun did not loosen. "But I see things. Dead people, sometimes. And they want favors in exchange for favors. I thought it was nonsense at first. But it works, Lucian. It actually works." She closed her eyes briefly. "To prove my usefulness to Armand, I made a deal with something that was not dead. I wish I knew what it was before I made the deal. I thought it was just like them. But it was not."

"What deal?"

"It decimated the Yarrow pack."

My eyes widened before I could control my reaction.

Armand had attacked the Yarrow pack against every piece of advice given to him, including my own. Yarrow had been larger, better positioned, and every available calculation had predicted a costly loss. Instead, against every reasonable projection, Beaumont had won decisively and absorbed Yarrow’s territory entirely.

For once, my calculations had been wrong, and I had never understood why.

"That was you?" I said slowly. Because I could not believe it. It made no logical sense, even if the world that we resided in was illogical.

"I thought it would ask for something simple in return," she said, tears beginning to track down her face now. "They always asked for something simple before. But it did not." Her voice broke entirely. "It wanted my next child."

I thought through the timeline rapidly. That deal had been made before Margaux’s birth.

"If that were true," I said, "Margaux would not be here. Would she?"