Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

Her expression softened entirely, worry melting into the particular warmth only a mother carried for a daughter she had not seen in too long.

"No," she said. "No, of course not. It is just so late, sweetheart. Come in, come in."

She ushered me through the door, chattering about how thin I looked, how she would put the kettle on immediately, how my father would be thrilled to see me in the morning.

"How is the Alpha’s family treating you?" she asked, leading me past the kitchen.

"They are good to me," I said.

As we moved through the narrow kitchen, my gaze slid to the knife on the counter, left behind after my mother sliced the evening’s bread. Its blade caught the overhead light, gleaming with quiet, patient intent.

The house felt smaller than I remembered.

Warmth spilled from the sitting room, carrying familiar laughter with it. My father’s deep voice drifted through the doorway before he appeared, stopping short the instant he saw me.

"Prim?"

I smiled.

"I missed home."

He crossed the room in three quick strides and pulled me into a fierce embrace.

"You should have sent word," he said, holding me at arm’s length. "Your mother told me she nearly dropped her phone when she saw you."

"I wanted it to be a surprise."

Two boys came charging from the hallway.

"Prim!"

My younger brothers nearly collided with each other as they tried to reach me first.

"You’ve gotten taller," I said.

"You always say that."

"Because it’s always true."

The youngest puffed out his chest.

"I’ll be taller than Father soon."

To which Father laughed.

"Not if I have anything to say about it."

My mother touched my arm.

"Go sit down. I’ll make tea."

"I’ll get myself some water first," I said, and without waiting for a reply, I turned toward the kitchen.

The kitchen was warm in the way kitchens were always warm in this house, bread cooling under a cloth, the kettle ticking as it came to a boil, and beneath the surface of my own smile, something else moved, patient and waiting.

"Prim!"

My younger sister came skidding in from the front room, still in her nightclothes, her hair messy from sleep she had clearly abandoned the moment she heard my voice in the hall. She threw her arms around my waist before I had turned fully toward her.

"What is the Alpha’s main estate even like?" she asked, pulling back, eyes bright with the kind of curiosity only a younger sibling carried for a sister who had gone somewhere bigger than home. "Is it true the floors are made of actual marble? Tessa said her cousin worked there once and said the chandeliers alone cost more than this whole border village."

"It is something," I said. My voice came out steady. Pleasant, even. "Very grand. Cold, though. Not like here."

She laughed, delighted, and her eyes drifted briefly to the counter, to the knife resting there beside the half-loaf.

"Want some bread?" I asked her, my hand already closing around the handle.

"Sure, I—"

I did not let her finish.

What happened next happened too fast for either of us to process properly, my body moving on instructions that were not mine, and her face went through shock and confusion before understanding arrived, and by then it was already too late for understanding to matter. She stumbled backward through the kitchen doorway, one hand pressed uselessly against her own throat, into the front room where the rest of the house could hear what I could not yet stop myself from having done.

I stood there for one suspended second, looking at my own hands.

Footsteps thundered down the stairs.

My mother appeared first, and the sound she made upon seeing her younger daughter was not a word, not language at all, just raw animal horror given voice. She turned toward me, her face streaked with what had reached her when she knelt beside my sister, and she screamed something I did not fully register because my hand had already found the second knife on the counter.

The distance between us closed in a way I had no memory of choosing.

She fell.

My father came around the corner next, dropping immediately to his knees beside his wife, his hands shaking as they hovered uselessly over wounds too severe for hands to fix. My two younger brothers stood frozen in the doorway behind him, eleven and thirteen, their faces caught between disbelief and the particular terror that came from watching something familiar turn into something with no name.

"Run," my father said to them, not looking up, his voice cracking. "Both of you, run, now—"

One bolted up the stairs.

The other, the older of the two, did not.

He came at me instead, fists raised, fourteen years old and shaking with a courage that had nowhere productive to go, and I felt some distant part of myself scream against what came next even as my hands carried it out anyway.

When it was finished, I turned toward my father.

He was on his feet now, something feral and grief-stricken twisting his features as he came at me with strength I had never once seen from him in my entire life, the strength of a man who had nothing left to protect except the act of trying. He fought harder than I expected. He fought well enough that, for a moment, I thought he might actually win, might actually stop this, might actually save what remained of his family from the thing and from the power now wearing his daughter’s face.

He had me on the ground, his hands around the weapon, ready to end it.

Then he looked at my eyes.

Whatever he saw there made something in him falter.

"What is happening to you?" he whispered, his voice breaking entirely, his grip loosening in the half-second where fatherhood overrode every instinct toward self-preservation he had left.

My hand found the blade again before his hesitation passed.

It was over almost immediately.

I pushed myself up from beneath him, blood soaking through my clothes now, my vision strange and tunneled, and I turned toward the stairs.

My younger brother, the one I had cut down earlier and left for a slow agonizing death, rather than finished, caught my ankle as I passed him, his strength failing with every breath, but his grip somehow holding anyway.

"Leave him alone," he said, barely audible, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

I pulled free and kept walking.

I found my youngest brother in the upstairs bathroom, pressed into the corner behind the tub, and what came after that I made myself not fully witness even as I carried it out, some small surviving fragment of myself retreating somewhere distant and dark while my hands finished what they had been sent here to do.

When it was done, I went through the house and sealed every window, every door, methodical in a way that horrified the small surviving piece of me watching from somewhere far removed from my own actions. I turned the gas on in the kitchen, in the front room, let it fill the house with its low, hissing promise.

I sat down in the front room.

I looked at what surrounded me.

And something cracked.

It came up through the compulsion like a swimmer breaking the surface after too long underwater, gasping, raw, entirely mine.

"What have I done?"

The words tore out of me, and I was moving before I finished saying them, crawling toward my sister first, my hands shaking as I pressed them against wounds that were already long past any help I could offer. I moved to my father next, then back toward the stairs, the spell fighting me with every step, dragging at my limbs like wet sand.

One of my brothers was still breathing.

Barely. A thin, wet sound, his chest rising in increments too small to sustain him much longer.

"I will save you," I said, my hands pressing against him, useless and desperate and far too late. "I will, I promise, just hold on—"

He did not hold on.

The moment his breathing stopped, something in me gave way entirely, and the spell flooded back in to fill the space my brief defiance had carved out, stronger now, absolute, closing over me completely.

I fought it anyway.

It did not matter.

My hand found the lighter, the one I did not even remember carrying, and I struck it without my permission ever being asked.

The world went ribbon yellow.