Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 180

Amelia

They said there was no pain under hypnosis, but that wasn’t true. There was pain, constant, ambient, gnawing at the edges of my awareness. It just didn’t feel like mine.

It felt inherited, like it was planted there. Foreign, but rooted.

My fists collided with the mirror again and again until the glass fractured like ice, webbing out in jagged veins.

Shards splintered outward, slicing my knuckles open in deep red gashes, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. Each crack felt like retribution, like punishment, like I was finally doing something, anything, about the festering ache in my chest.

The girl in the mirror didn’t flinch. She just stared, slack-jawed and watery-eyed, wearing that awful expression Serena used to wear whenever she wanted to comfort me without saying the truth. That look, quiet and apologetic and unbearably soft, made my stomach turn.

“You’re not real,” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re just what’s left of her. What she left me with.”

The voice in my ear was patient. Measured. “Good, Amelia.

You’re learning to see clearly.”

Vasha no longer towered over me. She no longer restrained me or ordered me to heel. These days, she sat beside me. She tucked blankets around my shoulders. Sheplaced warm cups of tea into my hands and never cared whether I drank them. She ran her fingers through my hair with something like tenderness. She called me strong, brave, and chosen.

I couldn’t remember when that started. Somewhere between the bruises fading and the memories blurring.

Maybe the drugs helped. Maybe I had simply stopped noticing the difference.

The mirror cracked again beneath my palm. Blood spilled down my wrist in long, slow streams, soaking the stone beneath us. I watched it pool near my knees. It felt deliberate. It felt ritualistic, like it meant something beyond injury.

“She let you suffer,” Vasha said. Her voice had dipped into something close to sympathy. “She knew what they would do to you, and she said nothing. That’s what Serena did.

She chose silence, again and again.”

She paused. “And Richard-”

My whole body recoiled before I could stop it.

Vasha exhaled slowly. “You still don’t want to hear his name.”

She tilted her head, watching me. “Do you think it’s loyalty? That flinch? Or shame?”

I stayed silent.

“You know what | think?” she said, voice low. “I thinkyou’re terrified I’m right. That he chose comfort. That he left you behind and hasn’t thought about you once.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“No,” she said gently, “but you feel it.”

“m tired,” I whispered, closing my eyes.

“I know. That’s why I’m going to show you something instead.”

Her fingers brushed my temple, and the room shifted.

There was no shimmer, no flash. Glamour rolled in gently, quietly, like it belonged. I didn’t fight it.

When the fog lifted, we were in my old room at the Pack House. The one with the ugly curtains and the dent in the dresser I’d made during my first heat. It smelled like home and childhood and fear.

Richard stood by the window, one hand resting on the glass, gazing out over the forest. His shoulders were relaxed. His face unguarded. He looked younger, lighter.

Elsa walked into frame behind him, barefoot and damp from a shower, wrapped in one of his shirts. My favorite.

She moved easily in the space like she’d never left. Her laughter was soft and private. It wasn’t the bitter, guarded version she wore in Council. It was real, intimate in a way that didn’t include me.

Jenny’s voice rang out from another room. “Breakfast’s ready!”Richard turned toward Elsa, he smiled and kissed her temple.

I staggered back and hit the wall. My breath stuck in my throat. “That’s not real. That can’t be real.”

“They’re a family again,” Vasha murmured. “Now that you’re out of the way, they’ve settled back into what always made sense. You were the interruption. The misstep.”

I shook my head hard. “No. He promised. He, he said he wouldn’t-”

He laughed again in the vision. Elsa tucked her head under his chin.

The image didn’t flicker.

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