Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 168

Amelia

The adrenaline from midnight hadn’t faded, but it had thinned into something brittle and stretched tight over nerves already frayed by hours of tension.

Screens refreshed in constant loops, each flicker resetting the room’s focus and dragging conversations into another spiral of uncertainty. Nathan stood at the front of the central hub, squared shoulders beneath his headset, commanding the comms team with the same calculated focus he’d once used in combat.

“Keep the western relay line clean,” he said.

“If anything

routes through Gate Nine, I want it checked three times before it moves forward. Don’t just assume a relay is clean because it passes a sniff test, no weak confirmations, no grey signals. I want hard proof for every single transmission, and I want a timestamped log to match. If someone tries to ghost a signal past us, I want the trail.

We need to know what’s real and what’s been touched.”

Simon, hunched behind him, monitored a spectral map on his tablet. Red rings pulsed from key district towers, signals that should have been stable. They weren’t. The resonance had shifted hours ago, subtly at first, but now the changes were precise and clearly intentional. His fingers moved fast across the surface of the screen, bringing up filters, diagnostic sweeps, and overlays.

“Bracken Ridge relays are spiking,” he muttered. “Mightbe weather, but the rhythm’s too clean to be natural.”

“Flag it,” Nathan said. “Reroute through southern nodes, isolate every duplicate, and run a fresh checksum. Save every echo. If they’re masking a breach, I want to see exactly where.”

Votes from the Border Packs were pouring in inconsistently, and every update contradicted the tast.

Richard would jump ahead by half a percent, only to lose it minutes later as David surged back in. The fluctuations didn’t follow any demographic model. This wasn’t voter uncertainty; it was tampering.

The volunteers felt it too. They didn’t voice it, but their expressions were brittle and wary. They kept glancing between Nathan and me, as if waiting for someone to admit what they already suspected. I kept my shoulders high and walked the length of the room, letting them see me upright, focused, and unafraid.

I stopped beside a volunteer frozen in front of a stalled screen. “Try refreshing manually. Don’t wait for the system to prompt you. We move first.”

He nodded quickly and obeyed. His hands were shaking. I rested a hand on his shoulder before moving on. I wasn’t there to inspire anyone. I just needed to look like I wasn’t unraveling, even if my stomach was curled in knots and my lungs couldn’t quite fill all the way. I didn’t let my voice waver, and when I smiled, it was the steady kind.

At the edge of the suite, Richard stepped up to thetemporary podium. The livestream light blinked in the upper corner of the nearest screen. He didn’t need notes.

He never did.

“We’re asking for mare than votes tonight,” he said. “We’re asking for calm, for discipline, and for strength, even when we don’t know what’s coming.”

He looked around the room, then directly into the camera.

“We are not enemies, not here, not across the borders.

How we behave right now is what they’ll remember. Not the margin.”

He stepped down. No applause followed. People just returned to work.

We left the floor and entered the control room behind the glass. The lights were low and the air cooler. It was the only place that felt untouched by chaos. The table was cluttered with drives, files, and cables, but none of it mattered right now. Richard sat across from me and reached out without hesitation.

I met him halfway and our fingers locked. The bond between us didn’t burn or pull. It stayed low and quiet, a steady background thrum I could feel in my chest. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t a need.

He turned, already bracing to argue, but I didn’t let him.

“You go in there now, it turns into a spectacle. We needrecords or timestamps. Something real they can’t spin to their advantage.”

He hesitated. His jaw tensed like he was chewing the urge to fight. Then he stopped.

I stepped a little closer. The wind was cold, and the tip of my nose had gone numb. Richard still hadn’t looked at me, but I could feel the rage rolling off him like heat from a cracked engine.

Below us, the square lit up in flickers and cheers, the sound of celebration humming beneath everything like it belonged to another world. I looked down at the lights and thought of every person we’d told to trust the system.

Every precinct that had handed their vote over and gone to bed hoping they mattered.

And I thought of the way David said it: Let them think they won something.

That wasn’t just manipulation. That was cruelty.

They were tampering with votes, not with arguments or scare tactics, but through embedded devices, signal hacks, and forged packet chains. We had heard it firsthand.

Now we had to prove it. Because if we didn’t, it wouldn’t matter what the truth was. No one would ever see it.