Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

I listened to Laurent’s side of the phone call and felt my stomach drop with every word he said.

Talks about Alpha Amine. How much we had found out at Ophelia’s and about how wrong we had been.

I already knew where this was going before he finished, the pieces sliding into place with the sick, cold clarity of something I’d been half expecting since the moment Prim first turned blue and confirmed what I hadn’t wanted to believe. Étienne knew now. Whatever careful plan I’d been building to break this to him gently had just collapsed in the space of a single phone call.

It was only a matter of time before it fully clicked for him that I had given him false assurance so I could leave for Ophelia.

"Give the phone to her," I heard Étienne say, tinny and urgent through the speaker.

Laurent turned toward me, already extending the phone in my direction.

That was when the head healer, sitting across from us with his remaining bag of herbs still balanced on his knees, went rigid.

"Goddess!" he breathed.

I didn’t even have time to ask what he’d seen before the car swerved violently, throwing us all sideways against our seat belts, and the phone slipped from Laurent’s outstretched hand before I could close my fingers around it.

"What’s going on?" Laurent shouted, gripping the door handle.

"What’s happening?" I echoed in allyship, my heart already hammering against my ribs.

The sentinel driving wrenched the wheel back the other way, correcting hard, and both he and the head healer screamed the same word at nearly the same instant.

"Séverine!"

I twisted around in my seat, and there she was.

Behind us, matching our speed with an ease that made no logical sense for a vehicle her size, Séverine sat in the passenger seat of a car that had appeared out of nowhere, waving at me through the windshield like we were old friends passing on a country road.

In the driver’s seat was a man whose eyes were fully white. She has definitely done something to him.

Then she moved her hand.

I saw them before I fully understood what I was looking at. Nearly translucent shapes... Or perhaps they could be referred to more as fingers that were the size of my entire torso, reached across the gap between our vehicles like something out of a nightmare I hadn’t known to prepare for.

"Step on it!" I screamed.

The tires shrieked in response, rubber clawing desperately at the asphalt as our sentinel slammed his foot down. The car surged forward, throwing me hard against the back of my seat.

I twisted around again, desperate to see how much distance we’d put between ourselves and the thing chasing us.

Then I saw a face.

A familiar face.

Séverine’s familiar was suddenly in front of us, moving with impossible speed, its body gliding across the road as though gravity had simply stopped applying to it.

My blood ran cold.

"Stop!"

I barely got the word out.

A hand rose from the darkness ahead.

There was no arm. No body. Nothing I could see that it belonged to.

Just a massive, invisible force pressing against the windshield.

It struck with the force of a collision.

The windshield buckled inward with a deafening crack, glass exploding across the dashboard as the entire front of the car crumpled beneath the impact. The force tore through the cabin, snapping my head forward and wrenching the breath from my lungs.

Then the world tilted.

The road disappeared beneath us.

The car lurched onto its side, and suddenly we were rolling.

I felt my body leave the seat entirely, weightless for one endless, horrible second, before the seat belt caught me hard enough to bruise, the strap biting into my throat and dragging a scream out of me that never made it past my own teeth. We would have gone straight through the shattered windshield without those belts. I understood that with perfect, terrible clarity even as the world spun end over end around me, sky and asphalt trading places over and over until I lost track of which direction was supposed to be up.

The phone flew loose from somewhere near Laurent’s feet.

I reached for it out of pure animal instinct, some part of my brain still convinced that keeping that connection to Étienne alive mattered more than anything else happening to my body right now, and I watched it sail through the ruptured window and slam into the asphalt outside, once, twice, the screen shattering further with each impact until it skidded to a stop somewhere I couldn’t see anymore.

The car finally stopped tumbling.

We hung upside down, seat belts being the only thing keeping any of us from crumpling onto the ceiling that had become our floor, and my whole body throbbed in places I didn’t have names for yet.

Laurent was bleeding. Badly. A gash above his eyebrow poured red down the side of his face, and he didn’t even flinch as he wrenched his own seat belt free and dropped, catching himself on his forearms before he reached over and released mine.

"I’m going to go out first," he said, his voice steady despite the blood running into his eye. "You need to shift the second your feet hit the ground. Run. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, you run."

I looked past him at the others.

One of the sentinels hung motionless, a jagged shard of glass buried deep in his shoulder, his eyes closed, and I couldn’t tell in that frantic half second whether he was breathing. The driving sentinel and the head healer were both still fighting with their own belts, their faces set with the particular grim determination of people who already knew what they were about to do.

They were going to stay. Séverine was there but there was also the familiar. Chances of them beating Séverine was already slim but in addition to that, they were going to fight something none of them could even see, something that had just flipped a moving vehicle with a single gesture, and they were going to do it so that I could get away.

"I can’t leave you to die," I said, my voice cracking.

Laurent grabbed my shoulders, hard enough that it hurt.

"A pack only stands if its head stays undefeated," he said. "You are paramount in the grand scheme of everything happening right now, and none of us mind laying our lives down for that. But trust me." His eyes held mine, fierce and certain even through the blood. "We are not going down without a fight."

He glanced past me, toward the road, and whatever he saw there made his jaw tighten.

"We don’t have time," he said.

I didn’t argue again.

I threw myself through the ruined gap where the other door had been, glass biting into my palms as I scrambled clear of the wreckage, and the second my bare feet touched the ground I heard a voice, human, panicked, somewhere off to my left.

"Someone just crawled out of the car," a man said, phone raised, his voice shaking. "They look hurt but alive, I think they’re—"

I wished I was able to help because he seemed like a decent person just calling for help and in seconds, I watched a hand close around his head.

It was not a human hand. It was the same nearly translucent shape I’d seen reaching for our windshield, wrapping around his skull with a casual, horrifying ease, and squeezing until something gave way with a sound I would hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life.

Séverine or perhaps her familiar had done that.

That was all the confirmation I needed.

I shifted without ceremony, the change tearing through me faster and more violently than it ever had, every joint and muscle screaming in protest, but I didn’t care. I didn’t have room to care. I bolted into the tree line on four legs, my paws tearing up dirt and undergrowth as I ran harder than I’d ever run in my life.

Something followed.

I could feel it behind me, gaining, and I understood with a sick, sinking certainty exactly what it was.

It was Séverine’s familiar.

The one who could apparently teleport, the one who didn’t need to run through trees the way I did because distance meant nothing to him.

I did the math anyway, desperate and useless as it was.

Could I outrun this thing?

No. Almost certainly not.

My best chance, my only real chance, was making it back to Ophelia’s. Back to people who understood what I was dealing with, who had wards, fae magic and knowledge I didn’t have. It was selfish, dragging danger back toward a wellness clinic which was now probably full of humans drinking tea and knitting sweaters now that we were gone, but it was the only plan my terrified brain could produce.

I made a sharp turn between two trees.

It was the worst decision I could have made.

Translucent hands closed around my hind leg mid stride, yanking me backward with a force that snapped through my whole body, and I was airborne before I understood what had happened, slamming into a tree trunk hard enough that my vision exploded into white static. It happened again. And again. My skull rattled inside itself despite the thick bone of my wolf form, and the pain of it forced me back into human skin, the shift ripping through me involuntarily as I crumpled naked and shaking against torn bark and dead leaves.

The familiar then approached.

His eyes were an odd, unnatural blue, glowing faintly in the shrouded artificial dark of branches and tree leaves.

Something about the way he moved told me he wasn’t hurrying. He didn’t need to. He’d already caught me.

I thought about Ophelia’s warning. About using up my life force. About the cost of what I was about to do.

But I didn’t see another option.

He came closer, close enough that I could see the details of his face now. He was handsome in a way that felt entirely beside the point, but close was what I needed as I threw everything I had left into my palms.

Gold light exploded outward, ribbons of it tearing through the darkness between us, so brilliant that I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the glare. His scream ripped through the air, raw and unrestrained, the sound of someone being burned alive.

When I forced my eyes open again, the light was still crawling over him.

Burns had already erupted across his skin, angry red welts spreading rapidly from his arms to his chest and throat. Smoke curled from the worst of them as he staggered backward, clawing at his own skin with a strangled, furious sound.

It was only a moment.

But it was enough.

I forced myself up onto legs that didn’t want to hold me, my whole body trembling, and I ran, the world already starting to blur and drip at the edges like paint left out in the rain, my own eyes spinning in a way that told me I’d pushed something inside myself further than it wanted to go.

I hoped I could make it.