Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LUCIAN

That only confirmed to me that my sister here was going through massive psychosis and needed help. This could not be found out either. That my sister was a madwoman. I spared a look at the sentinel. He had to die now for sure.

Vivianne’s crying intensified. "It was like it had planned all of it from the start. When I learned what it wanted, I made a promise to myself that I would never have another child. But Armand, for whatever twisted reason, wanted a child born from his victory. A living reminder of his transformation into something greater." She wiped at her face with her free hand, the gun never moving from her temple. "I was in no position to deny him that. So I asked Isabelle for help. The way she always helps me when my life becomes unbearable."

My eyes widened. It was a thing they had done since they were kids. I was certain now that they were grown, that rubbish had stopped. Apparently not. "You switched."

She nodded.

"Margaux is not mine," she said. "She belongs to Isabelle. And even knowing that, the thing still wants her. It says twins share one soul split into two bodies. That the child still belongs to it regardless of which body carried her." Her breathing had gone ragged. "I have to protect her, Lucian. I have to protect Margaux. I did this. I am the only one who can stop it."

"If you die, we lose Beaumont." My voice came out harder than I intended. "Do you understand what it took to get an Alpha to marry down into our bloodline? Do you understand everything we... I sacrificed to build what we have?"

"But Margaux—"

"Forget the child." The words left me before I had fully thought them through. "In fact, fuck the child! You matter more than this."

Something in her face shifted into an expression I had never seen from her before. Not anger but something worse than it. If I could point a finger at what it could have been, it would have been something closer to pity.

"That is exactly like you," she said quietly. "But I am not like you, big brother."

I knew what was coming the second she said those words, and somehow that knowledge did nothing to prepare me for the reality of it.

She pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked in her hand, and the back of her skull came apart in a spray of blood, bone, and shredded flesh that painted the wall behind her in a wet crimson arc before her body collapsed like its strings had been cut. One moment she was standing there, eyes fixed on mine, and the next she was crumpled on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, fragments of shattered skull scattered across the concrete around her.

I was moving before the echo of the shot had finished ringing through the room, dropping to my knees hard enough to crack the floor beneath them as I reached for her, my hands shaking while I tried to hold together what could not be held together. Blood poured through my fingers in hot, slippery streams, soaking my palms and wrists, running down my forearms in thick red ribbons as I pressed desperately against a wound that had obliterated half her head.

There was no pulse beneath my touch, no faint flutter of life to cling to, only the sickening warmth of fresh blood and the ruined remains of the woman I had failed to save.

The scent hit me a second later, sharp silver and bitter wolfsbane woven into the copper tang of blood, and I knew instantly what she had done. The round had been crafted for monsters like us, packed with enough silver to poison every cell it touched and enough wolfsbane to ensure that even the strongest healing factor would choke and die before it could begin repairing the damage.

Not that it would have mattered.

The bullet had entered through her mouth and exited through the back of her skull with catastrophic force, leaving nothing for regeneration to work with, nothing to knit together, nothing to restore. Pieces of her were on the floor. On my clothes. Embedded in the wall behind her.

My hands kept moving anyway, smearing blood across torn flesh and splintered bone as if refusing to accept what my eyes could already see. I pressed harder, desperate enough to believe that force alone could reverse time, that if I could somehow stop the torrent of blood flooding from the ruin of her head, she would open her eyes and breathe again.

But the blood kept coming.

And she didn’t move.

She didn’t breathe.

She didn’t come back.

She was gone before I could register that I was still trying to save what was lost.

The sentinel behind me had started babbling, something about Alpha Armand, about how this would devastate him, how word would spread, and the pack would fracture without its Luna.

"No... no, no, no, this can’t be happening."

I barely heard him.

My gaze remained fixed on her blood-covered face.

"The Alpha..." he whispered, then louder, as though the reality was only now settling in. "Someone has to tell Alpha Armand. Goddess, someone has to tell him."

He took a stumbling step backward.

"He’s going to lose his mind when he sees this."

I understood, in that moment, with perfect and terrible clarity, that I was about to lose everything I had spent years building.

The realization settled over me with an almost unnatural calm, a cold certainty that cut through the grief and horror flooding my system, because the sentinel wasn’t wrong. The second this left the room, the second word of her death reached the wrong ears, every alliance I had forged, every rival I had beaten into submission, every fragile piece of order holding me the Moreau name up would begin to crumble.

My fingers closed around the gun still hanging loosely from my sister’s blood-slick hand.

The sentinel was still talking.

"Alpha Armand—"

I raised the weapon.

He finally noticed me and his eyes widened.

The first shot struck him just above the left eye.

The back of his head erupted in a violent spray of blood, bone fragments, and grey matter that splattered across the wall behind him, painting it in a gruesome fan of crimson and white. The force snapped his head backward so violently that I heard the vertebrae in his neck crack before his body even began to fall.

But I couldn’t afford uncertainty.

I couldn’t afford witnesses.

I couldn’t afford mistakes.

Before he hit the ground, I fired again.

The second round punched through the center of his chest and tore out through his back, carrying fragments of shattered ribs and shredded tissue with it. Blood burst from the exit wound in a thick, dark wave that soaked the floor and spattered the nearby furniture, while the impact folded his body awkwardly in on itself before he crashed onto the concrete beside my sister.

His limbs twitched once.

Then again.

Blood bubbled from his ruined mouth and pooled beneath his cheek as the last involuntary spasms rippled through him.

Then there was nothing.

No one could know that Vivianne was dead tonight. Not yet. Not until I had decided exactly how the story would be told.

***

The memory released me the way it always did, all at once, dropping me back into my study with the diary still open in my hands and my sister’s handwriting staring up at me from a page she had written years before any of this happened.

I closed the book slowly.

"Not again," I said.