Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LUCIAN

I crossed into human territory sometime after noon, the scent changing the moment I stepped past the treeline.

Exhaust fumes replaced pine. Concrete replaced damp soil. The air smelled of gasoline, hot asphalt, and too many people packed too close together, even if the road I was now on was empty.

But running to the human border was a good idea.

The last place the pack sentinels would expect me to go was across our border into human territory. They would not follow my trail over the boundary because it would not make sense. Right now, the best line of action they would believe I was going to take was to gather money, retreat somewhere familiar, or beg my allies to stand behind me.

That would give me time.

And I intended to use that time.

The road stretched empty ahead of me.

I walked for nearly six minutes before I saw another living soul, too deep in my thoughts to pay much attention to the engine slowing behind me. Tires crunched over the shoulder.

Then a car door slammed, and a voice followed.

"You are a fucking disgusting pervert."

I turned.

A man was climbing out of the vehicle, his face twisted with disgust as his gaze traveled over my bare, dirt-streaked body.

"You can’t just walk around like that. There are children around here. A family could be fucking driving and see you in that state."

I glanced down at myself.

Dirt clung to my skin. Dried blood darkened my ribs and shoulder. My feet were filthy from the crash, and a fresh scrape along my thigh had started bleeding again somewhere along the road.

Right. Humans had rules about nudity.

Apparently, those rules mattered more than the fact that I looked like I’d crawled out of a wreck.

"I’m not doing anything."

He was already reaching for his phone.

The camera came up first.

"You guys need to see this," he muttered, his attention fixed on the screen as he began recording. "Some naked guy is walking down the road. I don’t even know what’s wrong with him."

He turned, and he raised his voice.

"Call the police!"

I followed his line of sight and saw a woman’s face appear behind the passenger window. She stared at me for half a second before fumbling for her phone.

I moved.

The man’s expression barely had time to change before the phone was ripped from his hand.

I flung it onto the asphalt, and then I slammed my feet into it, hard enough to shatter it into a dozen useless pieces.

The screen exploded beneath my heel with ease too.

His mouth fell open, but I did not even give him a second to recover as my hand closed around his throat and I lifted him up high, and given the height difference between us, lifting him off the ground took almost no effort at all

His shoes left the ground so quickly that his body swung with the momentum. A strangled sound caught in his throat as both hands flew to my wrist, fingers digging uselessly into my skin.

His face was already turning red.

I looked toward the woman. She had stopped dialing..

"Drop the fucking phone," I warned.

Her eyes flicked toward the man hanging helplessly from my hand, then back at her phone.

"I’m sure you don’t want your husband to die. So drop the fucking phone."

She was crying now, her hands trembling so badly that the phone nearly slipped from her fingers. Still, she obeyed. The device landed on the passenger seat with a soft clatter.

"Let go," she pleaded. "Please. Just let him go."

As if. I twisted my wrist and his neck snapped with a short, brittle crack.

I released him and his body hit the asphalt, limp and heavy.

The woman screamed.

She snatched the phone from the seat and threw herself out of the car, stumbling onto the empty road as no new car had passed. She made it perhaps ten feet before I caught her from behind and drove her into the asphalt hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs.

The phone skidded from her hand.

I caught her wrist before she could reach for it.

"Please," she wheezed. "Please, spare me."

I dragged her onto her back.

"No dice, sweetheart."

Her eyes widened as I tilted her head to the side, exposing her throat.

My claws sank in.

When the struggling stopped, I waited until her body went completely still before getting to my feet.

I carried them both back to the car.

The man went into the trunk first. I stripped off his clothes, leaving him in nothing but his briefs, then pulled them over my own bloodstained skin. The shirt was a little tight across my shoulders, and the trousers sat awkwardly at my waist, but from a distance, no one would look twice.

I tossed his body into the trunk beside the woman and slammed it shut.

Her phone was still lying where she’d dropped it.

I went back, picked it up,before taking her hand, and pressing her thumb against the screen successfully unlocking it.

I scrolled through the contacts app and started to type down a number I knew by heart.

One of my sentinels.

Someone I’d trusted for years. Someone who would give me the truth, even when the truth was ugly.

The call rang as I climbed behind the wheel.

It did not go through the first two calls so I decided to just start the engine and pulled onto the road.

That was when the line connected.

I said nothing. I stayed quiet, waiting for a familiar voice to speak first, some instinct telling me to gauge the situation before giving myself away.

But it was the same for the voice on the other end. Silence stretched on the other end, longer than it should have.

Then a familiar voice finally came through, cold enough to make my hand tighten around the steering wheel.

"Is this you, Uncle Lucian?"

I froze. Was that... Bastien?

"Bastien?"

The name came out before I could stop it, the shock unmistakable even to my own ears.

"Where are you?" His voice trembled, but there was nothing frightened about it. Fury sat beneath every word. "Where the hell are you?"

I stared through the windshield.

"She sent you a letter too. I assume."

"I don’t give a shit about any of that!" he exploded. "Where are you? I want to end your life with my own hands."

I ended the call.

The silence inside the car rushed back in.

I placed the phone on the passenger seat and exhaled slowly through my nose.

My office was compromised.

Whatever secure line I’d relied on for years was no longer secure and was most likely dead now. Isabelle had made certain of that. Her letters had gone exactly where she’d intended them to go, carrying enough information to turn the people closest to me into hunters, kill my credibility and mae me enemy number one.

She hadn’t merely exposed me.

She’d taken away every safe place I had.

I was a fugitive now. Not temporarily. Not in some technical sense that could be corrected with the right conversation or the right amount of influence.

Fully.

There was no going back to the life I’d had that morning.

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

Isabelle.

For one vicious moment, I wanted to tear her apart myself.

Then I remembered she was most likely now dead.

If her letter was telling the truth, she’d taken her own life before anyone could reach her. Even if she hadn’t, she was like me now, a dead woman. And a dead woman was useless to me now.

The anger remained.

It had nowhere to go.

I needed somewhere to put it.

Someone.

Someone still breathing. Someone within reach. Someone who could pay for everything Isabelle had ripped away from me.

My thoughts settled on Margaux.

The moment her name surfaced, something inside me went still.

Something with purpose, and I stepped on the gas immediately.

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