Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

The demon sat across from me, a chessboard suspended between us in the endless white nothing. No table held it up. No floor existed beneath it. The pieces simply hovered in perfect formation, waiting for one of us to decide where they belonged.

Far above us, the ceiling of this impossible place stretched away into the distance, fractured in places where enormous golden chains disappeared into the whiteness. Every so often, one of them groaned under the strain, the sound traveling through the emptiness like something alive.

The demon studied the board as though we had nowhere else to be.

As though my body wasn’t somewhere above us, rotting.

As though his own wasn’t either.

"Have you given up on breaking free?" I asked.

I nudged a piece forward, barely bothering to look at the move.

His gaze followed it.

"The fae is remarkably strong." He tilted his head, examining the position I’d created. "I find myself wondering how old she actually is. More importantly, I wonder why something possessing that kind of power would bind itself to a simple whisperer of all creatures."

"When you told me to hold your hand," I reminded him, "I thought you were promising me unrivaled strength."

His eyes lifted to mine.

"If I’d known the reality would be chess and small talk in a white room while both our bodies slowly rot somewhere beyond it, I never would have taken your hand."

A low chuckle rolled from him.

"Without your shade, you’re actually quite mean."

He moved a knight.

"I like it."

"You’re remarkably casual for someone who tricked me."

"I offered you a deal." His tone remained maddeningly pleasant. "You accepted it."

"You conveniently left out the part where I’d be trapped in here with you."

"If I hadn’t taken your hand, you would have died horribly." He gestured lazily toward the empty space around us. "That other witch would have won everything she wanted, and you would have been nothing more than another corpse."

He moved another piece.

"Besides, that fae has very little stake in any of this, if we’re being truthful. We wouldn’t be sitting in this predicament at all if you’d simply killed that werewolf boy when you had the opportunity."

My fingers tightened around the piece in my hand.

I dropped it onto the board harder than necessary.

The impact sent several pieces trembling.

"I actually wanted to ask you about that."

The amusement in his expression faded by a fraction.

"Why did I hesitate?"

I leaned back, staring at the board without really seeing it.

"I wanted him dead. I remember that much. I wanted it badly. But there was something underneath it." I frowned. "Some ghost of a feeling. Something that kept telling me I didn’t actually want to kill him, even though I knew I did."

The demon watched me for a long moment.

Something thoughtful passed through his expression.

"You’ve only just lost your shade."

"And?"

"It happens."

He reached across the board and shifted a pawn forward.

"Shades don’t always take everything with them cleanly. Sometimes the feelings disappear, but the impressions remain. Echoes. Habits. Attachments that no longer have a heart behind them, yet somehow still influence what the body does."

I stared at him.

"Even compassion?"

"Even compassion."

He gave the piece another slight push.

"Some of the cruelest witches in history have experienced it. A moment of hesitation. A flicker of mercy. Something buried beneath all the ugliness that refuses to die when the shade does."

He looked up at me.

"Take the witch you helped kill."

My expression hardened.

"She once let me into her mind," he continued. "Not recently so don’t get jealous. It was a while back. And when I connected to her, I found someone else buried in the memories she’d inherited."

"Who?"

"Her mother."

I waited. "What about her?"

The demon’s fingers rested lightly against one of his pieces. "She abandoned her daughter."

I said nothing.

"Not because she didn’t care about her. Quite the opposite." His voice lost some of its amusement. "The woman knew exactly what her daughter was. A witch-wolf hybrid. An anomaly. And she knew the place she came from would never allow something like that to grow into anything, especially if there was a chance it would have a heart."

He paused.

"So she convinced herself that leaving the girl somewhere else was an act of mercy."

"She was wrong. Completely." His mouth curved faintly. "The girl would have thrived on that mountain regardless. She became the sociopath she was always going to become."

"And your point is?"

"My point is that it is the same with you."

He leaned forward, resting his elbows against his knees.

"Some part of you still cares about Étienne."

I felt something unpleasant twist in my chest.

"Even without your shade, the attachment remains. You don’t feel it anymore, not properly. But whatever part of you was built around him hasn’t quite figured out that it is supposed to disappear."

He moved his queen.

"That’s why you hesitated."

I stared at the board.

The demon’s eyes remained fixed on me.

"There’s a piece of the old Margaux still making decisions."

"That’s supposed to make me feel better?"

"No."

His smile returned.

"It’s supposed to make you understand how dangerous weakness can be."

He sat back and glanced toward the distant chains.

One of them groaned.

The demon’s smile widened.

"Fortunately, I won’t have to tolerate that weakness for much longer."

My eyes followed his.

The golden shackles were still there, stretched across the impossible distance above us, but now I noticed something I hadn’t before.

Thin fractures ran along their surfaces.

"You’re breaking them."

"Slowly," He tapped one finger against the chessboard. "But surely."

His attention returned to me.

"And when I finally get free, Margaux..."

He lifted a piece.

"...the first thing I’m going to do is find Étienne."

He placed it down with quiet precision.

"And kill him."

"Good," I murmured.

The demon’s brow furrowed. "Good?"

"Good luck trying."

A voice drifted through the white nothing before he could answer. "You will not be free from those shackles."

The voice carried strangely, neither loud nor soft, yet it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"Your terror ends here."

I turned. The demon turned with me. And there she stood.

My mother.

For a moment, I simply stared at her. Then I rose from the chessboard entirely, a laugh tearing out of me before I could stop it.

"If it isn’t the lying bitch herself," I looked her over from head to toe. "How exactly are you even here?"

"She’s a spirit now," the demon explained, rising beside me. His eyes remained fixed on her, curiosity warring with the first hint of caution I’d ever seen from him. "Apparently."

I laughed again. "Did you slit your wrists?"

My mother didn’t react.

"Or did you finally realize your little secret was out, and it was only a matter of time before someone put your head on the chopping block?"

I smiled at her.

It wasn’t a kind smile.

"Mother..." The word tasted rancid. I nearly spat it onto the floor. "What an absolute load of bullshit. The audacity of you, pretending to be my mother all this time."

I turned toward the demon.

"Kill her."

Then I turned my back on her.

He moved instantly.

A thunderous crack split the white room.

Strangely, a shared pain detonated through my chest.

I staggered, my hand flying instinctively to the place where the impact seemed to have struck. My fingers found skin that was completely intact, yet the phantom agony beneath it was so sharp that my knees nearly buckled.

I looked up.

My mother hadn’t moved.

She stood exactly where she’d been, her expression untouched by the attack.

The demon, however, was no longer beside me or on her.

He had been hurled across the room.

His body struck a wall that had not existed a moment ago, the impact sending a tremor through the endless white space before he crumpled against it.

I blinked.

"That’s impressive."

I barely got the words out.

She vanished. Not moved. Vanished.

The space where she’d stood warped for a fraction of a second, like a broken image struggling to load, and then she was suddenly in front of me.

I threw my hands up.

Power ripped out of me.

The psychic force erupted in a violent wave, tearing across the white expanse toward her with enough strength to crush everything in its path. I felt it leave me, raw and uncontrolled, an extension of every ounce of rage I had left.

She glitched again.

The world seemed to skip.

My attack passed through the space she’d formerly occupied and struck the demon instead.

He had been charging toward us, and the wave caught him squarely in the chest. His body folded around the impact before he was launched backward, skidding across the impossible floor.

I spun and she was gone again.

Then something moved behind me.

I turned too late.

She stood at my back, close enough that I felt the strange cold radiating from her.

Her hands were no longer entirely solid.

The fingers had become translucent, almost glasslike, and a pale light pulsed beneath them. It crawled through her palms and along the delicates of her wrists, illuminating them from within. The glow intensified as she lifted her hands toward me, gathering in her fingertips like something alive.

"This is for your own good, Margo," she said.

She plunged her hand straight into my chest.

I felt something tear loose from somewhere deep inside me, and across the room the demon collapsed, screaming, thrashing against a pain that seemed to mirror whatever was happening to me directly. I looked down and watched her hand slowly pull something out of my own body, inky black and pulsing like a second, wrong heartbeat, and she closed her fingers around it and crushed it without a flicker of hesitation.

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