Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 179

Richard

The hallucination shattered.

One second, Amelia’s voice was in my ear, whispering my name and warm against my neck, and the next, I was flat on the floor of the sanctum. Bile filled my throat, and my head caved in under the weight of something ancient and wrong.

The illusion had been too vivid, her fingers curling in my shirt, her breath catching against my cheek, but none of it was real. Not the words. Not the touch. Just the blood pact fucking with my mind again.

1 rolled onto my side and vomited onto the stone beneath me.

I barely noticed Nathan’s hand gripping my shoulder or Eldric murmuring something about calming breaths. My heart was crashing like it wanted out of my ribs, and my wolf, silent for days, was pacing in tight, desperate circles, growling low in my skull. Storm wasn’t forming words or thoughts, only sending warnings and pain.

I could feel myself slipping, some tether fraying inside me that I hadn’t even realized I was holding. My fingernails scraped the stone beneath me as the pressure in my head kept building, and somewhere behind the nausea and noise, I felt the bond rippling, tugging like a hook buried deep in my chest.”Richard,” Nathan said, Low and urgent. “You’re here.

You’re in your body. Stay with me.”

I nodded, barely. Then I closed my eyes again. The room tilted, and the floor vanished.

This time, it didn’t pretend to be Amelia. It dragged me into fire.

My father appeared, bigger than I remembered, hunched and breathing hard, fingers tight around my wrist. My ribs burned where he gripped me. I was nine. I had cried during a sparring match, and that was all it took.

“You are not here to feel,” he said. “You are here to rule.”

His face melted into mine.

Suddenly I was in my old room, not the one redone for guests, but the one they never opened unless someone failed. My younger self was curled into the corner of the mattress with no sheets. His face was blotchy from crying.

Silent. I’d forgotten what that looked like, how small | really was and how afraid I had been.

Behind me, another door slammed. My father again, dragging someone else this time. Not me, Jenny. She was screaming, refusing to train after her mother left. He shoved her inside and locked the bolt. I hadn’t remembered this. I didn’t want to.

Then another memory. I walked away from Jenny during a panic attack. I had been embarrassed by her shakinghands and told a junior officer to deal with it because I had a strategy meeting to attend. She hadn’t spoken to me for a week after that.

Then Serena. She had begged to delay the raid on the Hollow temple because the scouts hadn’t returned yet. I remembered overruling her with a smile and calling it a calculated risk, but something about the memory didn’t sit right. That couldn’t have been real. I had never known her. But someone who looked a lot like me was standing there, giving the order, and those scouts died.

Another memory. The famine in the lowlands. I rationed medicine by family rank. A healer begged me to make an exception for a child with seizures. I said no. The child died that night.

Jenny on the infirmary floor, outside her Grandmother’s room. Her arms locked around her knees. I told her she didn’t have to go in. She didn’t answer. She just looked up at me, desperate for something I didn’t know how to give.

She was fifteen. Red-faced, fists clenched. “You only love the part of me that acts like you.”

Later, older. Standing on the Council balcony. Her voice was shaking as she defended me to wolves who would’ve eaten her alive if I hadn’t made her this way. I told myself she believed in me. What she really believed was that she had no choice.

Amelia was next, or maybe she’d always been there.On the stone, barely breathing. Her voice crackled through the bond like something dying. “Please don’t make me do this again.” She’d whispered that after a Gala too, when I asked her to smile for a camera while her feet were bleeding under her dress. I’d kissed her temple and called it resilience.

Then I saw myself deleting her early petition draft, one when she was only an intern. I told her it was too raw, said-the Council wouldn’t respond to emotion. What I meant was, I didn’t want them to know how much she cared.

Another memory. Amelia crying after a trial. She had lost her temperat the tribunal, and I made her apologize to the Elders. I told her control was more important than pride. She didn’t sleep beside me that night.

I stepped forward. The floor dissolved beneath me.

Her eyes opened. Black and empty. “You always knew how this would end.”

Behind her, my reflection stood in full ceremonial robes.

His hands were behind his back as he stared down at a kingdom that no longer had anyone left to question him.

Amelia’s necklace circled his wrist, now a cuff. Jenny’s blade hung on the wall behind him. He had turned them both into symbols. That was all they were to him now.

He turned, his expression calm. Complete. He had everything and no one.

And the throne behind him-

My father’s. It was the same shape, the same carvings, the same polished base. I had rebuilt his empire, just with better manners.

I tried to scream. The pact wasn’t done.

Serena’s body slumped in my arms. Amelia bandaging her feet in the hallway, breathing through the pain alone. Her eyes when I told the Council the appeal was a mistake.

The stillness in her face when she realized I was never going to defend her.

Her voice whispered again, low and half-forgotten. “I’m not built for this.” She had said that once, early, with her forehead pressed to my chest. I didn’t answer her then.

The pact gave her a new line this time.

“You made me carry it anyway, and when I fell, you looked away.”

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