Claimed by the scarred Alpha

VIVIANNE

I flipped the page, unable to stop myself from reading on.

The handwriting shifted here, became slightly more controlled than the frantic entries that had preceded it, the kind of control that came not from calm but from someone who had decided that what they were writing down needed to be legible when found later.

"I met a dead Beaumont Luna."

I had to read that line twice.

The entry that followed described the encounter with the particular care my sister reserved for things she wanted to preserve exactly as they happened rather than filtered through interpretation. She had met this woman, this Luna, through the sight. Not in the living world. On the other side of whatever membrane separated the breathing from the finished.

She wrote that she had immediately related to the woman. That there was a quality to her presence that felt recognizable in the specific way only certain kinds of suffering were recognizable to people who had experienced adjacent versions of it.

"She was murdered by her own husband," my sister wrote. "He wanted a younger wife. A perkier Luna who made him look better in rooms full of important people. And so he arranged for her to stop existing, and then he arranged for everyone around him to remember the story differently."

Then a pause in the entry, and then:

"Things have not changed despite the years that have passed. I am not sure they ever will."

I set the journal down on my knee for a moment and breathed.

The next entry gave a name to the individual she met.

Amaranthine.

I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over in my mind, testing it against my memory the way you tested old wood for rot, pressing gently at different points to see which ones gave.

Amaranthine.

There was a portrait in the great hall. I had walked past it hundreds of times without paying it the attention it deserved, the way you stopped seeing things that had been in your peripheral vision long enough. A formal sitting portrait, oils darkened with age, a woman with an expression that had always struck me as too composed for comfort, the kind of composure that came from practice rather than ease. The nameplate beneath it had been there since before I took my sister’s life, before I became Vivianne in anything except the blood running through my veins.

Amaranthine Beaumont. Former Luna. Beloved.

I picked the journal back up.

"I have been trying to figure out how to be useful to Armand," my sister wrote. "He has wants that he will not say plainly, the way powerful men always have wants they will not name directly because naming them would require accountability. So I asked him outright. I said Tell me what you want most, and I will see what I can do."

"He said he wanted to defeat the Yarrow pack and in what world would I be able to give him that?"

I stopped reading.

I looked at the wall across from me and thought about what I knew of the Yarrow pack. What everyone in Beaumont knew, or thought they knew. Yarrow had been considerably larger than Beaumont at the time of the conflict. Better-resourced, better-positioned, with a pack size that should have made the outcome of any direct confrontation straightforward. The Alpha house had been slaughtered entirely, not something that happened easily against a pack of that scale, and Beaumont had absorbed the territory and the surviving members with a speed that everyone at the time had attributed to Armand’s tactical genius and the particular favor of the goddess.

Armand was many things.

A tactical genius had never been among them.

I kept reading.

"I made a deal with Luna Amaranthine," my sister wrote. "Spirits can sometimes offer favors that reach further than they should. The ones who died violently, alone, carrying unresolved grievances, they hold more than the ordinary dead. They can alter things. Bend them. I should have understood sooner that what I was dealing with was not something that operated by the rules I thought applied."

"Yarrow fell. Armand won. I was pleased with myself."

"Then it told me what it wanted in return."

The handwriting changed on the next line, the letters pressing harder into the paper.

"It wanted my child."

My sister wrote that at first, she hadn’t grasped what the demand truly meant—what it meant for a demon to claim an unborn child, or how such a claim would ever become real. She imagined it was a metaphor, some dark turn of phrase, and convinced herself, as only the desperate could, that she would find a loophole before the reckoning came.

Later, she wrote of Armand’s desire for a child to commemorate his victory—a living symbol of Beaumont’s new era. She knew, even as she wrote it, that she could not give him that child. To carry it would be to surrender it, to deliver exactly what the demon had claimed.

There was a pause in the entry, the paper warped by dried tears—marks I knew all too well. With worry gnawing my insides, I turned to the next page.

"So I used my sister."

The words sat there without elaboration for one full line before she continued.

"I thought twins were separate. I thought that what was mine was mine and what was hers was hers, that the egg split at birth meant the claim could not follow. My sister came into the world an Omega after all and I, a Gamma. I was wrong."

"Twins are apparently a dark anomaly. Split from the same egg down to the same soul, divided rather than duplicated. The payment for the favor still held. The child my dear sister carried was still promised."

I stared at the page.

"What," I said aloud, to the empty bathroom, to the water still sitting in the tub behind me, to the ruined phone at the bottom of it.

Margaux?

My daughter?