CLAIMED BY THE BLACKTHORN ALPHA

My mother had already chosen her before the woman ever stepped through our door. I didn't understand that yet. I only knew something had gone wrong weeks before anyone said a word to me — the way Rosalind Ashford's eyes slid past me at dinner, the way she stopped humming while she brushed my hair, the way she started watching me like she was waiting to confirm something she already suspected. I'd tried asking her about it once, a few days earlier, catching her alone in the hallway outside the kitchen. "Mother, have I done something?" "Why would you think that?" "You've been strange with me. Distant." "I have a great deal on my mind, Emilia. Not everything is about you." She'd said it gently enough, but her eyes hadn't quite met mine, and I'd gone to bed that night turning the exchange over and over, certain there was more to it than she was letting on. I just hadn't imagined it would be this. I was folding linens at the top of the stairs when the front door opened and I finally understood why. "My baby," my mother sobbed, both hands pressed to her mouth. "My real baby." A stranger stood in the doorway — tall, sharp-boned, dressed in traveling leathers gone soft with wear. Beside her stood a girl my own age, dark-haired, dark-eyed, chin lifted like she already knew she'd won. "You said you needed to see her first." My father's voice, low, strained, directed at the stranger like this was a conversation they'd already had. "You said once you brought proof, we'd know for certain." "And now you do." The woman rested a hand on the girl's shoulder. "Sixteen years, Beta Ashford. The records never lied. Only the healer who switched you two did." My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "You've met her before," I said, descending the stairs slowly, my voice smaller than I wanted. "Mother. You've already spoken to her." Rosalind's jaw tightened, and for one terrible second I watched her decide whether to lie to my face. "Three weeks ago," she admitted. "She came with documents. I needed time to be sure before I said anything to you." "Sure of what? That I'm not your daughter?" "Sure that I wasn't about to break your heart over nothing." My mother's eyes were wet, but they weren't looking at me with love. They were looking at me like I was already a problem she'd started solving without me. "I had to know, Emilia." "You could have told me. You could have let me be part of finding out, instead of letting me walk around this house for three weeks thinking nothing had changed while you decided my whole life without me." "I was protecting you." "You were protecting yourself. There's a difference, Mother, and I think you know it." "Her name is Vivienne," the stranger said, and the way my mother's face softened at the sound of it told me everything I needed to know about how this was going to end. "And yours?" I asked, turning to the stranger directly for the first time. "You know my mother's name. You know my sister's name, apparently. What should I call the woman who's about to take apart my family?" "Corinne." She said it without flinching, like the question hadn't landed the way I meant it to. "And I understand this is difficult, sweet girl. I lost sixteen years with my own daughter. I'm not here to make an enemy of you." "You're standing in my house claiming I'm not who I've always been. I'd say that makes you an enemy whether you mean to be one or not." My father stepped forward then, something pained crossing his face. "Emilia—" "Don't." I looked at him, and for a moment I thought I saw the man who used to carry me on his shoulders through the training yard, buried somewhere under all that careful composure. "Don't say my name like you're about to comfort me. You already decided which story you believe. I watched you decide it the second she walked in." He didn't answer that. He didn't have to. His silence was answer enough. I should have screamed. I should have demanded the proof myself, right there in the hallway, in front of everyone. Instead I stood frozen on the stairs with a stack of linens still clutched to my chest, watching my family build a new daughter out of a stranger's story, and said nothing at all. I found my grandfather in the garden an hour later, exactly where I knew he'd be. He wasn't really pruning. He was waiting for me. "They already believed her before she even arrived," I said. My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated myself for it. "Three weeks, Grandfather. Mother's known for three weeks and she let me walk around this house thinking nothing had changed." Alaric set down his shears. "Sit." "I don't want to sit. I want someone to tell me why a stranger's word means more than sixteen years of being her daughter." My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my knees to stop it, and it didn't work. "What did I do? What could I possibly have done to make this easy for them?" "Nothing," he said quietly. "That's the part that should frighten you more than it does. You didn't do anything. People don't need a reason to choose the easier story over the true one. They only need permission." "Then give me something that isn't permission to doubt me too." He reached out and tapped two fingers behind my left ear, where a small crescent-shaped birthmark hid beneath my hair — the same mark his late wife had carried, passed down like a signature only our bloodline wrote. "This is permission," he said. "No forged paper switches blood. Your mother knows this mark as well as I do. She held you the day you were born, Emilia. She counted your fingers. She knows exactly what this is." "Then why hasn't she said so?" "Because believing a lie is easier than admitting she almost threw away the truth for one." His eyes were steady on mine, the only steady thing in my entire world that day. "Show her tonight. Not in front of that woman. Just the two of you. Let her look at you without an audience deciding for her." "And if she still chooses them, even then?" "Then you'll have lost nothing you hadn't already lost today." He squeezed my hand. "But I don't think you will, little moon. I don't think a mother forgets her own daughter's hands that easily, however hard someone's working to convince her otherwise." Something in my chest loosened, just slightly, like a held breath finally let out. Hope. I didn't trust it, not after the hallway, not after three weeks of silence I hadn't even known I was living inside. But some foolish, stubborn part of me reached for it anyway. "And if she still doesn't listen?" "Then you come back out here," Alaric said, "and we figure out what comes next together. You are not alone in this, little moon. Whatever she decides tonight." I wanted to believe that more than I'd wanted anything in years. I walked back toward the house that evening with the birthmark concealed again beneath my hair and my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. Through the study window I could see my mother's shape moving back and forth, pacing, her voice rising and falling in conversation I couldn't make out. Corinne was still there. Vivienne was still there. The whole house still smelled like a story that hadn't finished being written. I didn't know, standing there in the dark with my hand raised to knock, whether I was about to save what was left of my family or watch the last of it close its door on me for good.