Claimed by the scarred Alpha

SÉVERINE

I slapped him before he finished.

The sound was flat and sharp in the low corridor. His head turned with it.

"This is your fault." I heard the tightness in my own voice and didn’t bother to smooth it. "If you had just compromised—"

I turned to my familiar. "Clear their memories of this discovery and ensure that their memories of Theodore’s orders which you will now edit, include me."

He moved to the two on the left without comment. I returned my attention to the sentinel still facing me.

My hand was still pressed to his cheek, and I looked at him for a moment. I knew what was coming and I still hated the part where I had to actually do it.

I lifted one finger.

He struggled at first and more unseen hands came around him to hold him in place. Regardless, his whole body fought hard against it. It was a futile fight though. Considering you could not touch it.

All that remained for him to do was resist and struggle like a worm.

I pressed the tip of my finger against the side of his skull and felt the resistance give, soft and terrible, and I pushed in.

The brain was not what people imagined it to be. Most people imagined something solid when they thought about it. It was nothing like that. Memory sat inside it like sediment in water, layers that shifted when disturbed and settled differently when the disturbance stopped. I had learned to move carefully in this space because the alternative was damage that could not be undone without cost, and damage in here came with a cost I did not want to waste a marked one on.

I found the memory of the last few minutes and I pulled at it carefully, dismantling the recognition, the reaching for weapons and the spoken realization. I found the earlier order, the one where Étienne had drawn the line at him and Laurent, and I worked in beside it. I kept my movements small. I kept them deliberate. I had made mistakes with this kind of work before, early on, when I was still learning the limits of what I could touch without consequence, and I did not want to repeat them here.

I was nearly done when he started to jerk.

"No." The word came out of me before any thought accompanied it. "No... No..."

The convulsions moved through him in long pulses, his face going slack at the same time his body fought. Even saliva started gathering at the corner of his mouth and beginning to trail down. I knew what it meant. I had seen it before.

I turned to my familiar, who was still working on the second sentinel.

"Come," I said. "He’s dying. I don’t know what I did wrong. I did everything right."

He extracted himself from the second man in a single motion and crossed the distance between us fast. He looked at the sentinel with the quick, assessing stillness that passed for alarm in him.

"You didn’t cut the thread of the false memory you stitched in." His voice carried no judgment, only diagnosis. "Trying to pull yourself out of his head without a snip beforehand would mean you want to take all his other memories along with it. And what is a man without his memories?"

He pressed his own hand against the man’s skull and I felt him move in beside where I was still anchored. We pulled back at the same time, steady and synchronized, and I felt the thread release cleanly.

The jerking stopped.

I breathed out.

"This is why I hate this spell." I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist. "It is too complex. You have to be so careful with all of it."

"Practice makes perfect." He withdrew fully, examining his fingers with an expression of idle interest. "Cost us nothing either, as it turns out."

"Easy for you to say."

"Ready?"

I nodded.

He snapped his fingers.

The three sentinels went still for a second, then two, their faces carrying a brief empty quality that always preceded the reset.

Then they straightened, and their expressions slowly cleared.

The one in front of me bowed with the ease of someone who had no idea he had been dying thirty seconds ago.

"Luna Severine."

"Spare me." I waved him off. "I want to see the intruders. The ones brought in."

"Of course." He turned without hesitation. "This way."

He led me down the corridor and I followed with my familiar drifting at my shoulder, invisible again.

"These are the sentinels," the guard said, gesturing along the row of cells. "And the Beta from their group is in solitary. Over in the corner there."

I looked toward where he pointed and then back to the main cells.

"You can go," I said. "Thank you for the help."

He bowed and left. My familiar reappeared beside me, settling back into the humanoid shape he preferred for conversation.

Though he still made sure to keep himself hidden.

The cells were dim. One held sentinels whose faces I clocked quickly and moved past. The corner cell was different. The person inside had arranged themselves in the darkness with what felt like intent, sitting far enough from the light that their features didn’t resolve into anything I could read. They seemed comfortable in that. Like the darkness was a preference rather than a condition.

"I heard screaming." The voice came from the shadow, even, unhurried and undisputedly male. "I hope my sentinels aren’t being tortured."

"No." I stopped in front of the cell. "Just imprisoned."

He stepped forward. Not fully into the light, but enough that I could see the shape of his face, the particular way he held himself. He looked at me funny.

If I could liken it to anything, it would be that it felt as if he were deciding whether this stranger was worth the energy of caution.

"I don’t recognize you."

"I am Luna Severine." I held his gaze. "And you?"

"None of your business, I imagine."

He stepped back into the shadow and I watched him go. The dismissal was performed rather than felt, which told me something.

"I’m an ally of yours," I said. "Which means you should be courteous."

"No Valcourt wolf is a friend of mine."

"I’m not Valcourt." I let a beat pass. "Not yet. And I’m not interested in small talk." I studied the darkness where he stood. "I’m here to offer a partnership. The kind where both sides benefit. Symbiotic if you will."

"Pass."

"Really? Even if it concerns Margaux?"

The silence that followed had a different texture than the ones before it. He did not step forward yet. But he did not retreat either. Something shifted in the quality of his stillness, the way a held breath was different from a resting one.

"Go on," he said.