Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

"Your family will be buried properly." Margaux’s voice was gentle, carrying none of the careful pity people usually reserved for the broken. She simply stated it as a promise, as though it had already been done. "That should help put them to rest."

"They’re already at rest." The words came quietly.

"They never stayed because they were not angry. They did not have an obsession as deep as mine."

She looked at me, waiting.

"It kills me, too." My throat tightened around every syllable. "They didn’t hate me. They should have. After everything I did to them..." I closed my eyes, and for one terrible instant I could still feel the weight of the knife in my hand, still hear the sounds that followed. "I met them when I crossed over. And even then...They should have looked at me with fear. With disgust. With something."

Instead...

They had looked at me with love.

Even at the end.

Margaux reached across the only bench in the garden, and she attempted and failed to wrap her fingers around mine.

It reminded me I was dead. It reminded her that I was dead.

"It wasn’t your fault." She told me.

I laughed once. It was a brittle, joyless sound.

"Don’t."

"You weren’t in control."

"I was." I shook my head. "Not all the time, but for a moment..." My voice cracked. "I broke free for a moment."

The memory stabbed through me with unbearable clarity.

For one heartbeat, Severine’s grip had slipped.

I had known exactly what I was doing.

I had known exactly what I was about to do.

"I should have slit my own throat."

The confession hung between us.

"I should have died before I hurt them."

"No."

"I had enough control to understand what was happening. That should have been enough."

"It wouldn’t have stopped Severine."

"It would have stopped me."

"I’ll help you," Margaux assured me.

I looked at her.

She continued. "I’ll help you get your revenge on Severine. We’ll make sure she answers for everything she’s done."

For the first time since waking in this strange half-life, the crushing weight inside my chest eased, if only by the smallest measure.

"Thank you," I whispered.

The wind blew and caused the flowers to shake, which caught her attention. She went down to look at it.

Before either of us could speak again, a familiar voice carried across the garden.

"Margotine!"

Margaux’s head turned immediately, a smile finding her face before she could stop it.

I followed her gaze.

Étienne was crossing the garden toward us, his stride easy, the single word he’d called carrying a warmth that needed no explanation.

I left them to it.

I could feel what was coming the moment he called out her name across the garden, the quality of it, the particular warmth underneath the single word that told me everything I needed to know about what the next hour was going to look like. I had no interest in being present for it, both because my own grief was too fresh and because some things deserved privacy that a wandering spirit had no business interrupting.

I drifted upward from the garden and back toward the main building.

The estate at evening had a different quality from the estate in daylight. The corridors held their shadows differently, the rooms breathed more slowly, and the things that moved through it unseen, which included me, moved with less urgency than they had during the chaos of the day.

I thought about what Margaux had said, about my family being properly buried, about rest being possible.

My mother had never been anything except kind. She had been the kind of person who stood outside in the cold to wave goodbye when you left for somewhere you were excited about, who kept the light on past when she should have gone to sleep. My father had been quieter but no less consistent, his love expressed in the particular way he tracked whether you had eaten and whether you were sleeping and whether the small daily requirements of being alive were being met.

My brothers...

I moved through the thought, and past it before it could take me somewhere I could not return from.

They were at rest, at least I told myself.

They had told me that they had not hated me.

Even if that was almost worse than if they had.

I drifted toward the upper corridors and let my attention move outward the way it had been moving since I came back through, sensing the texture of the estate around me, the living warmth of it in most places, the occasional cold spots where something older than the building’s age had settled.

And then I felt something that stopped me entirely.

A dark energy.

Concentrated and deliberate, nothing like the ambient cold of natural spiritual presence, nothing like the residue of old grief or old violence that buildings accumulated over decades. This was something that had intent behind it, something that was not wandering but had arrived with a purpose and was currently occupying a specific location.

Margaux’s room.

I moved toward it.

The creature standing in the center of the room looked like a spirit. It wore the appearance of one convincingly, the translucence, the slight wrongness of a form that was not quite solid, all the surface markers of something that had died and not yet moved on. If I had encountered it in a corridor without looking closely, I might have taken it for exactly what it was presenting itself as.

But there was something underneath the presentation that I could feel without being able to fully name. A dark thing, pressing against the edges of the image it was projecting, leaking through at the seams the way light leaked through a door that was not fully closed.

"What are you?" I said.

The creature looked at me with an expression I could not read.

"The name is Alpha Amine," it said pleasantly.