Claimed by the scarred Alpha

VIVIANNE

I stepped out of the bathroom and made a beeline for the journal, drawn as if by a magnetic pull.

Lucian’s words were still circling in my head, the specific detail of what he had told me about our sister’s final months, the progression of what she had seen and heard and believed before she decided the only way to protect anyone was to remove herself from the equation entirely. I had spent years sealing that part of our history behind a wall I carefully maintained and checked often to make sure it held.

The wall was no longer holding.

Margaux was seeing threads. Dead people. Invisible figures that whispered to her, gliding through rooms and leaving traces on the world that defied every word I knew. My sister had once searched for those words too, filling page after frantic page, desperate to name what could not be named.

I tore the cover open, found the section Lucian had read from, and let my fingers carry me further, past the familiar into the unknown.

The entry that stopped me was not the one he had quoted, but one deeper in, penned in a steadier hand, as if she had stumbled upon a rare island of calm amid the storm.

"The funny thing about this is that I believe it started when I was a child."

I read it, then let my eyes race onward, unable to stop.

She wrote about telling our mother, about trying to describe the colors, the connections, the silent figures haunting rooms no one else could see. Even mother had called it an active imagination, nurturing it the way mothers do with things they find harmless and mysterious. For a while, it had felt like a gift, not a burden.

Who did not like an active imagination in a child?

But it had not stopped.

She simply stopped speaking of it, which was not the same as it ever ending.

Then the threads.

She described finding them as if uncovering something that had always existed, only now coming into focus. Connections ran from hand to hand in meaningful colors, repeating until patterns slowly revealed themselves.

I turned the page and found a hand-drawn diagram, her careful script labeling each color with meanings she had distilled from long, patient observation.

Red stood for enduring fate. The connection that survived distance, conflict, even death in certain cases. It was most often romantic, she wrote, and felt sacred in a way that was difficult to articulate without sounding foolish. These bonds were not always easy, not always kind, but they were permanent in some fundamental way that the other threads were not.

Gold... Fated but unstable. Passionate and consuming, transformative in both directions, often cruel on its way through. These relationships changed people, she wrote, but they left marks. She had drawn a small asterisk beside this one and added in the margin that the gold thread was not exclusively romantic, that she had once seen it between a mother and a child, and that the relationship had altered them both irreversibly before it ended in the child’s own death.

Black was regarded as the obstacle thread. The person tied to you would interfere with your path or your happiness, not necessarily from malice, which was what made it genuinely tragic. Sometimes, she wrote, both people destroyed each other without ever intending to. Without even understanding what they were doing until it was finished.

Silver was temporary but meaningful. A relationship designed to teach something specific or heal something specific before it ended naturally. These were not lesser connections, she wrote carefully. They were simply complete in themselves rather than ongoing.

Blue implied loyalty and protection. It was most often covered by family hands, or by friendships that had calcified into something more durable than most people’s love. Sworn companions. Guards. Relationships where the foundation was not just passion but steadiness.

My eyes caught a small squibble beside that one, pressed into the margin in handwriting just a shade different, as if it had been added in a quieter moment, after the fact.

Just like Isabelle and me.

A knot formed in my throat, sudden and sharp.

I pressed my fingers flat against the page, forcing myself to keep reading before the feeling could swell into something unmanageable.

White was a true spiritual connection. Rare, she noted, with the particular emphasis of someone who had encountered it only a handful of times and found it remarkable each instance. Two souls who understood each other completely, often without needing words, but who might never become romantic partners in any conventional sense. The connection was not about that.

Green stood for growth and prosperity. The relationship led somewhere, toward power or success or the kind of personal evolution that required another person’s presence to catalyze.

The thread of purple was the mark of obsession and imbalance. One person became emotionally dependent on the other in ways that damaged both. A bond where the devotion was real but had curdled into something possessive, something that closed around the other person rather than opening toward them.

And then the last entry on the page, separated from the others by a line she had drawn deliberately.

There is something that frightens me more than any of the colors.

She wrote about the threadless hand. A palm with nothing running from it in any direction, no connections visible, no bonds readable. She had seen it only twice, she wrote. She did not fully understand it yet. Either someone who had disconnected themselves from fate entirely, she theorized, or someone whose destiny had become unreadable because of the weight of what they had done and continued to do.

And then the final line, pressed into the bottom of the page.

This is why Big Brother scares me. He has no threads at all. He is unpredictable. Is it karma for his sins? Or does he simply not have a destiny?

I closed the journal slowly and let it rest in my lap, my gaze drifting unfocused, hands splayed across the cover.

Lucian had no threads.

Margaux was seeing everything my sister had seen, following the same path toward the same understanding through the same impossible gift that no one in our family had ever been equipped to guide her through, because the one person who might have understood it had put a silver bullet through her own skull before Margaux was old enough to remember her.

I opened the journal again and started from the beginning.