Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

"Yann," I said. "That name sounds familiar."

He looked at me with the patient expression of someone who had been sitting in darkness long enough to stop being surprised by most things.

"It probably should," he said. "You most likely know my little brother."

I thought about it. The face in front of me, the specific configuration of the features, the thing I had been trying to place since he materialized out of the liquid dark.

"I do not think I know anyone by that name," I said. "In my life, I mean. Before."

"Étienne," he said.

My eyes went wide before I could manage the reaction.

"The current Alpha of Valcourt," I said slowly, working through it. "He was adopted after the Alpha’s true son took his own life. They called him Theodore, officially. But the demon, when he was talking about him, he used the name... Étienne. And there were other moments, people in that estate who would slip and use it." I looked at him carefully. "Is he your brother?"

"He is," Yann said simply.

I stood in that for a moment.

The resemblance that had been nagging at me since he appeared snapped into focus, not perfectly, because grief and death and whatever this place had done to Yann had altered the surface of him, but clearly enough that I understood what I had been looking at and not seeing.

"How did you end up in here?" I said. "In the stomach of whatever that thing is."

He exhaled, a habit the dead carried forward from the living even when breath was no longer a requirement.

"It is a long story," he said. "Years back. My family was framed. For things we did not do, by people who understood that the best way to remove a threat was to make everyone else believe the threat was real." He paused. "We were murdered for it. Brutally and publicly, the way you murdered people when you wanted the message to be as large as the act itself."

I said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.

"You know where we spawn first," he said. "When we come back."

I swallowed. "Our deeds are read. If we are pure enough, we pass into Elysium. If we want to return, and if our karma allows it, we can come back this way. As what we are. To settle whatever was left unfinished. If our spiritual energy can take it."

"What is yours?" he asked.

"A witch," I said. "She used my family and me as collateral damage in her own game. I want her dead." I looked at him directly. "Who do you want dead?"

"I would say an entire pack," he said, and there was something in the way he said it that was not anger exactly, something that had moved past anger into something more settled and more patient. "But the guardian at the other side told me the truth of it was more specific than that. A demon’s work. Someone had been mentally manipulated by the creature whose stomach we are both currently standing in, and that fool was convinced that my family’s continued existence was a threat that needed to be eliminated. He could not take us out directly. So he was smart enough to find a man who could be persuaded, and he used him." He looked at me. "That is mostly why I came back. I had all the information I needed to expose what the demon had done. And it got to me first."

"I split myself," I said. "Before it consumed me. It is a talent I apparently have as whatever kind of spirit I am. So not all of me is here. But the fragment I split off is so small I genuinely do not know if it can reach Margaux or communicate anything useful even if it does."

"Margaux," he repeated. Something moved in his face. "She is here?"

"She is." I looked at him. "She is your brother’s mate. I think you know that. Right?"

He nodded once, slowly. But it was more like he was thinking deeply about something.

"Is there a way out of here?" I said.

"No."

The voice came from somewhere behind me, not from Yann, and I turned.

A woman stepped out of the liquid dark as though she had been standing there all along, listening without interruption, simply waiting for the conversation to reach the moment she wanted. She was older than Yann, old enough to be his mother, and one look between them made the relationship obvious before either of them spoke.

"We have tried," she said. "Many things. Over many years. There is no way out."

I looked back at Yann.

"This is my mother," he said quietly. "She was a victim of the demon as well."

I turned to her fully.

Her face carried the quiet weariness of someone who had lived alongside grief for so long that it had become part of her without ever becoming all of her. It was there in her eyes, but so was kindness, and a steadiness that suggested she had refused to let sorrow be the final thing people remembered about her.

"At least," she said, after a moment, "not without consequences."

"What kind of consequences?" I said.

She looked at me steadily. "I do not know what kind of spirit you are. What you are made of. But we are made of positive energies. Whatever we carried in life, whatever goodness, anger, love, or purpose, it becomes the material of what we are after." She paused. "Depending on how much we carry and how strong we were when we came back, an implosion of that spiritual energy could create a path out of this darkness."

I understood what she was saying before she finished saying it.

"But that would mean," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Whoever creates the path perishes. Ceases to exist in any form."

The liquid dark pressed around us.

I thought about my mother waving me off from the front step.

I thought about my brothers.

I thought about the deal I had made with Margaux, the Omegas still marked and suffering somewhere in that estate, and the witch who had walked away free while I was standing in the stomach of a demon having a conversation about whether I was willing to stop existing entirely.

I thought about the fragment of myself, tiny and uncertain, floating somewhere outside this dark.

"And you really believe it will work?" I asked.

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