Claimed by the scarred Alpha

SÉVERINE

"All right, Amine." I kept my voice steady, even as my body reeled from the landing, the bullet, and the sight of my familiar unraveling in every direction at once. "Why do you want to help me?"

"Because I want something," he said simply. "And I can only obtain it if you first obtain what you want."

"What do you want?"

"That is not your concern at this stage."

"Then there is no deal." I locked eyes with him, unmoving. "I do not agree to terms I cannot read."

"I am being kind to you." His voice was stripped of menace, which made it far more chilling. "I could hurt you right now if I chose to. You should factor that into your negotiating posture."

"I can taste your bloodlust from here," he added. "Which means I already have cause to retaliate. In that sense, we are already on equal footing."

He then disappeared.

He reappeared directly behind me.

I refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing me flinch.

"You should be more accommodating," he said, his voice arriving over my shoulder. "Being difficult because you are frightened is genuinely beneath you, and I did not take you for someone who operated that far below their own ceiling."

"That kind of flattery does not work on me." I turned to face him, keeping my expression flat. "Restore my familiar and leave. I want nothing further to do with you."

"While I cannot kill him," he said, tilting his head slightly, "I can eat him."

I went still.

He was not performing. There was no theater, no dramatic flourish. He spoke as if stating a fact, something routine, and that matter-of-fact delivery was more convincing than any threat he could have made.

I looked at what remained of my familiar, scattered and still.

Then I looked back at the entity calling himself Amine.

We measured each other in silence, until something in his expression softened into something almost reasonable.

"I do not actually want to be unpleasant," he said. "Equal footing, as I suggested. I can be honest. A little."

"A little," I repeated.

"Margaux."

My attention sharpened involuntarily.

"What about her?"

"Her bloodline made a pact with me," he said. "Some time ago. It is complicated in its specifics, but the short version is that I was promised something, and that something is being withheld from me." He paused. "Do you know the story of Rumpelstiltskin?"

"Yes."

"I am the imp in that particular telling. What I was promised is her. I have been working toward that for a considerable amount of time. Breaking her down incrementally, systematically, until her spirit fractures properly and I can collect what was agreed to." He said it with the calm of someone describing a business arrangement that had hit an administrative delay. "She is more resilient than I anticipated. It has taken longer than projected."

"What do you need me for?"

"The final stage requires the boy she is attached to," he said. "The mate bond complicates collection. A whole soul is considerably harder to take than a fractured one, and the bond keeps repairing damage I inflict." He looked at me steadily. "You are the variable that addresses that problem."

I did not quite believe him. He could be lying and just saying the right words to egg me on. But even his stance now was not right. Because...

"I would never hurt Étienne." The words came out before I could consider whether saying them handed him anything.

He laughed.

The sound was not mocking. It was genuine amusement, the kind that comes from finding delight in the unexpected.

"A witch should never say never," he said, once he had finished. "The reason your kind is genuinely terrifying is precisely that you do not have a natural stopping point. You have no shade. Which means that there is no line you will not cross when the motivation is sufficient." He paused, something shifting in his expression. "I have said more than I intended to."

He stepped back slightly.

"I have no particular business with the boy. I do not want to hurt him. Which is why I mentioned the destiny swap." He watched my face. "That was me, by the way. Not your familiar. I was the voice in your room."

The pieces of the puzzle shifted into place.

He had been there. In my room. Wearing my familiar’s form well enough that I had not questioned it, because why would I have questioned it, and he had planted the idea deliberately, carefully, at exactly the moment when I was raw enough and desperate enough to hear it properly.

"A dejected spirit," he continued, "is the most exquisite thing. The weight of hope that has curdled into its opposite. There is nothing quite like it." He said it with the particular appreciation of a connoisseur describing a vintage. "The destiny swap would allow you to live the life she was supposed to live with him. Her fate becomes yours. The mate bond, his love, his undivided devotion. All of it transferred to you, cleanly and completely. And everything you carry, all your karma, all your history, becomes hers to bear alone."

"I would become her?"

"You would have everything she has. Everything she is supposed to have." His voice dropped into something quieter and more pointed. "You would have Étienne. Not performing patience for him, not managing what you showed him, not wearing yourself down trying to be a version of yourself that would not frighten him away. Just you, accepted entirely, loved completely, in the life that was apparently written for someone else." He paused. "Is that not what you have wanted? Not just him specifically, but to be witnessed. Fully. Without someone eventually stepping backward."

Something split open in my chest before I could seal it shut.

I was seven, maybe eight, and the château had that hush it only ever wore when something deliciously scandalous had just happened—only this time, no one had found out yet. The blood on the marble had crept farther than I’d wagered it would, like it was auditioning for a starring role in a gothic opera. I took my time with the nanny, smoothing her dress, tucking stray hair behind her ear, determined to make her look presentable—she’d been crying about missing her family, and I had solved that, hadn’t I? The least I could do was make sure she looked perfectly at peace, ready for her close-up.

I heard my father’s footsteps and looked up, ready to show him.

"Papa." I smiled and gestured. "See what I did."

His face went wrong.

He didn’t look angry. Not even horrified, as he should have been—a rational response to a child’s hands stained red. Instead, he looked emptied out, as if the marrow had been scraped from his bones. His skin went the color of old paper, lips bloodless, eyes flickering with a primal fear that made him tremble at the edges, as if every instinct screamed to run but his body had forgotten how.

"I heard her crying to herself. She was not having the best time here," I explained. "She said she missed her family. So I made sure she did not have to miss them anymore."

I waited for the approval.

I waited for the warmth that came when I had done something that pleased him.

His lips moved.

He said my name, and he stepped back, and he said six words that I had never, not once in the years since, managed to fully unhear.

"You are just like her. Your mother."

The memory fractured.

I was back on the mountainside with the entity watching my face with the interest of something that had just located exactly what it was looking for.

My hands curled into fists at my sides.

I had spent my entire life since that moment trying to find one person who would not do what my father had done. Who would look at the full inventory of what I was and choose to stay anyway, not despite it but including it, without requiring that I sand down the parts that made people step backward. Étienne had come closer than anyone. But even with him I wore a version of myself that felt like him, that felt manageable, that kept the other parts in rooms he was never invited into.

If I did not have to do that anymore.

If someone simply gave me a life where the decision had already been made, where the bond itself made stepping backward impossible.

"How does it work?" I said.

He smiled, and the smile was the first expression he had produced that looked entirely genuine.

He raised one finger and pressed it to my forehead.

The memory of a rune seared itself into my mind. It was not mere pain, but a crawling, cold agony—an invasive sensation that rooted itself deep beneath my skin. The shape of it etched itself into my skull, pulsing with a malignant intent, as if it were alive and hungry, waiting for its moment to devour.

"That simple," he said.

"My familiar," I said. "Fix him."

"Of course. You need him for the casting." He glanced toward the scattered pieces. "Though I should mention that he will likely try to talk you out of this. He has opinions about your choices."

"When I have made up my mind," I said, "there is not much that can stop me."

"A beautiful way to exist." He raised one finger again and pressed it to my familiar’s forehead, or what remained of it, and pulled something free, a thin luminous thread of something I could not name, and burned it between his fingers until nothing remained.

"What was that?"

"What happened here. He will not remember any of it." He stepped back. "The choice remains yours alone."

He snapped his fingers and ceased to exist in the space he had been occupying.

The pieces of my familiar convulsed, twitching on the ground as if resisting the pull that yanked them together. Flesh slithered back over bone with a wet, sucking sound. Splinters of rib twisted, knitting jaggedly into place, each one scraping with a noise that made my teeth ache. The wounds didn’t close so much as fester, sealing over with raw, angry meat that throbbed and oozed. When his eyes finally opened, there was nothing gentle in them—only the wild, animal confusion of something dragged back across the threshold, forced into coherence by violence.

"What happened?" he said.

I looked at him.

"We landed hard," I said. "While protecting me, you hit a rock. How do you feel?"

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