Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LAURENT

Something was wrong with her.

The certainty settled quietly, almost imperceptibly, long before I could have explained where it had come from.

I had been watching Margaux since the gates of the estate disappeared behind us, my attention drifting back to her no matter how many times I tried to convince myself I was imagining it. Nothing about her was dramatic enough to justify concern. She was sitting exactly as she always did, back straight against the leather seat, her hands folded neatly in her lap, every inch of her arranged into the picture of composure she wore whenever she wanted the rest of the world to believe she was perfectly in control.

Only it wasn’t quite convincing today.

Her eyes kept abandoning the road ahead, slipping instead to the empty stretch of seat beside her before returning to the windscreen a heartbeat later. She wasn’t looking at anything. It was the sort of distracted movement people made when their thoughts refused to stay where they were supposed to, when whatever occupied them felt more immediate than the world unfolding outside the window.

She had already urged the driver to go faster twice.

Not demanded it, because that wasn’t Margaux’s way. The requests had come quietly, politely even, but each one had carried an urgency she hadn’t bothered disguising. Every few minutes her gaze found the dashboard clock before flicking back to the road, her thumb brushing absently over the edge of one finger as though she had become aware of the gesture only after she’d already started doing it.

Across from her, the head healer continued giving directions with effortless certainty, leaning forward every so often to point out another turn.

Margaux, on the other hand, looked like someone trying very hard not to think at all.

Something was up.

Jitters didn’t make someone watch time disappear in anxious fragments. They didn’t settle across someone’s shoulders until every muscle looked as though it had forgotten how to relax.

I let the silence stretch between us for another minute, hoping she might volunteer whatever was circling inside her own head.

She didn’t.

So I bit.

"Is something wrong?"

She answered almost immediately, as though she had been expecting the question.

"Of course not." Her gaze remained fixed beyond the windscreen. "It is just jitters. I’ve never been to the human side of things before."

I studied her profile for another moment.

"You can tell me," I said, keeping my voice quieter than before. "Whatever it is."

Only then did she look at me.

Her eyes searched my face with an intensity that caught me slightly off guard, lingering there long enough that I had the distinct impression she wasn’t looking at me so much as weighing something against me. It was the same expression I’d seen on people standing at the edge of a confession, when they had already decided the truth deserved to be spoken but hadn’t yet decided whether the person listening deserved to hear it.

The awareness came without effort, settling somewhere beneath conscious thought before my mind could begin assembling reasons for it. I had learned a long time ago to trust that feeling. My instincts rarely announced themselves loudly. They arrived as the faint shift of a current beneath still water, subtle enough that anyone else might have missed it entirely.

She knew something.

Something that mattered.

"What if I do," she asked carefully, "and you freak out?"

"Margaux," I said. "A pack is not just numbers. What makes us a pack is the information we share. What we know together. If there is something you are carrying that is going to make me panic when I hear it, is it not smarter to have me know it now rather than discover it at the worst possible moment?"

She exhaled through her nose.

"Something is wrong with Prim," she said. "I think she was attacked. Something happened to her last night, and I do not know what or by whom, but she showed up this morning as a blob with no form and no voice. Just presence."

The head healer and I turned at the same moment.

"What?" we said.

"Stop the car," I told the driver.

The car screamed to a halt at the shoulder.

"Turn around," I nearly screamed. "Now."

"No." Margaux’s voice was firm. "We are close. Are we not?" She looked at the head healer.

"We are approaching the border," he said. "But we are talking about a witch who can teleport anywhere at any given time with no apparent restrictions. The risk calculus here—"

"Your safety is what matters," I said. "If something happens to you, Étienne will fucking flip and rightfully s—"

"Laurent." She said my name the way people said names when they wanted to stop an argument before it could build momentum. "We could turn back and be attacked anyway. There is no safe direction right now. I am in the dark and there are people’s lives connected to whatever Séverine has done. If we go back, I am no closer to being able to help them."

"We could bring the sister here," I said. "Have her come to us instead."

The head healer made a sound that communicated disagreement before his words did. "My sister does not engage with packs. At all. When she first left, our parents tried everything to bring her back. They still try occasionally." He looked at Margaux directly. "She agreed to see you specifically because of what you might be. A rogue has no allegiance to anyone’s pack. She might be my sister and I can ask but I know her. She will not come to us."

"So it is today or nothing," Margaux said to me.

I sat with it.

She was Luna. Her word carried before mine in this car. That was the structure of it, and I had never had cause to resent that structure until this precise moment when it was being used to prevent me from doing the sensible thing.

I looked at the sentinel at the wheel, who was visibly relieved not to have to choose between two authorities.

"Obey your Luna," I said. "Drive. And please step on it."

He stepped on it.

I turned back to Margaux.

"What actually happened to Prim?" I pressed. "What can you tell me?"

"I wish I knew more," she said. "She cannot speak. She can only answer yes and no through color. What I got from her was that she was attacked. Something came at her and whatever it did left her in this state."

"Could another spirit have done it?"

She shook her head slowly. "A spirit doing this to another spirit seems unlikely based on what I understand. This felt like something with more force behind it."

"What about Alpha Amine?" I said. "The apparition we encountered in the library. Maybe he could have seen or heard something given he is a ghost too. If he witnessed something, he might have information."

She went quiet.

Not the quiet of someone thinking. The quiet of someone looking at something I could not see.

She was staring at a blank space.

"Margaux." I leaned forward slightly. "Did Prim just say something?"

She turned to me. "I have worked out a way to communicate with her through color responses. And she just reacted when you mentioned Alpha Amine."

She turned back to the empty space beside her.

"Prim, Did Alpha Amine attack you?" she said.