Claimed by the scarred Alpha

VIVIANNE

The phone call spun endlessly in my mind, refusing to settle even after I placed the stupid thing down.

There was something in Margaux’s description that unsettled me, a discomfort I could not quite name. Threads binding people. Shadowy presences that did not belong. Her words tugged at something ancient and half-remembered, something I had spent years teaching myself to ignore. I forced the feeling down, unwilling to let it form into anything I would have to face.

Yet it surfaced anyway. A memory, distant and crackling, like static on an old radio.

"Isabelle... do you know what the red thread of fate is?"

The memory had barely begun to settle when a knock rattled at my door.

"Who is it?"

"My name is Raven." The voice was small and careful, pitched just above a whisper. "I am the new Omega placed in your charge, Luna Vivianne."

"Oh." I straightened in my chair, smoothing my expression into something appropriately composed. "Come in."

"Good morning, ma’am."

"Good morning."

She stepped in, eyes cast down, wearing the careful deference all new staff wore until they learned the true rhythms of this house and how much respect was truly required.

"Could I get some lemongrass tea, please?"

"Of course."

She turned toward the door.

As she turned to go, I glimpsed bruises blooming along her forearm, still fresh, the color not yet fading to yellow.

"What happened to you?"

She laughed, awkward and quick, the kind of laugh people used when they wanted to make something smaller than it actually was. "As Luna, you require a new Omega to attend to your needs. Given what happened last time, the sentinels wanted to be thorough. Make sure there were no others connected to the Alliance Against Rank in your service."

"They tortured you."

"They needed to confirm I am not affiliated with them." She said it without resentment, with the practiced calm of someone who had learned that resentment served no purpose in this particular house. "The system works the way it is meant to work. I am glad to serve you, Luna Vivianne."

A quiet, immediate disgust twisted beneath my ribs. This was my doing. My lies and plotting and the false demand for more security after what Lucain had done to Amara had led directly to this. To a girl standing before me, bruised and choosing gratitude, because gratitude was safer than anything else.

I smiled anyway. It came easily after all these years. "Thank you. The tea, whenever you have a moment."

She bowed and turned toward the door.

She opened it and walked directly into someone standing on the other side.

"Gamma Lucian," she said, bowing quickly before stepping past him and out into the corridor, her footsteps already fading.

My stomach clenched before I even registered who stood there. Some instinct, older than thought, recognized the weight of his presence before my eyes caught up.

Lucian’s smile lingered on her retreating back a moment too long. He entered, closing the door with the slow certainty of a man who would stay as long as he pleased.

He was holding a book.

My gaze landed on the book before anything else, drawn to it the way one’s eyes find the single wrong thing in an otherwise ordinary room.

"Bastien will marry the Texier girl," I said, filling the silence before he could fill it with something worse, my voice steady despite the unease building beneath it. "I played the disapproving mother quite convincingly. Everyone is suffering for it now, exactly as planned. But anything for Moreau, I suppose."

"Family comes first." He said it lightly, almost affectionately, like a pleasantry rather than the verdict it actually was. "I was speaking with Beta Anthony earlier. He has been searching for his children." He tilted his head slightly, watching my face with the particular attentiveness he reserved for moments when he already knew the answer and wanted to see how I would handle being asked anyway. "I do hope those little gremlins are not causing trouble by, let us say, traveling to Valcourt because of their dear friend."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I do not know." He shrugged, the gesture deliberately casual. "Perhaps you caught wind of something you would not mind sharing."

"I am not a babysitter." I kept my voice level, my hands folded in my lap, where he could not see them tighten. "I do not know where Anthony’s children have gone."

Again, my eyes fell to the book.

"What is that?"

"Your diary."

"I never kept diaries."

"Vivianne did."

My eyes widened before I could stop them, my face betraying me instantly, as it always did in front of him, no matter how many years I had spent perfecting composure for every other room in this estate.

"Why did you bring it here?" I said.

"I have told you before not to keep secrets from me." He smiled, the particular smile he wore when he believed he held every advantage in a room, which was nearly every time he smiled at all. "You always think you are smarter than you actually are." He paused, savoring something private. "There is a secret I had nearly forgotten you were keeping. Until today."

"Lucian—"

"Isabelle."

The room stilled around me, in a way that had nothing to do with the air itself.

He had never once, in the decades I had worn this false life, called me by that name. Not once. He had been the architect of the story that buried it entirely, the one who decided exactly how the narrative would be told, that Isabelle had taken her own life along with a sentinel’s, that Vivianne had simply continued forward, untouched and intact, grieving a twin rather than having become her. For him to say that name now, deliberately, in this room, holding this particular book, meant something fundamental had shifted between us.

"I do not know what you are talking about," I said, rising from my chair despite my legs feeling considerably less steady than I wanted them to be.

"Sit down."

"Lucian—"

"I do not particularly care what you know or do not know right now." His voice stayed pleasant, almost conversational, which made it land considerably worse than if he had shouted. "It helped you adopt her life rather seamlessly, all things considered. Especially after she decided to put a bullet through her own skull in front of me." He opened the book to a marked page, his fingers finding it without hesitation, which told me he had already read this passage more than once before bringing it here. "Given that Margaux is your daughter, biologically, not Vivianne’s, I would strongly suggest you avoid feeding whatever suspicion is already taking root in her mind."

"What are you talking about?"

"The phone call, little sister." He looked at me with the patience of a predator who already knew exactly how this conversation would end before either of us had finished speaking. "I imagine Margo remembers, on some level buried deep enough that she does not consciously recognize it, the real Vivianne unraveling. Before she made her bloody exit."

He turned the book toward himself and began to read.