Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 78

I went to his bedroom to find something to sleep in. He’d already pulled out one of his old t-shirts, the kind that hung to mid-thigh on me. I was halfway into it when I spotted the glass in the trash.

A wine glass. Lipstick smeared across the rim. Pale pink. Not mine.

I froze, my breath catching in my throat. My hand stayed on the hem of the shirt.

I stared at it. Stared until the room blurred. Then looked away.

He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. I didn’t have the right to. But that night, as he curled around me in bed, his arm slung over my waist like nothing had changed, I didn’t sleep. My eyes stayed open in the dark, watching the slow shift of headlights against the wall. I could still taste his mouth. Still hear the things he hadn’t said.

1 left before dawn. Dressed in silence. Crept barefoot across his hardwood floors, gathered my clothes, and stepped into my heels like I was preparing for battle. I didn’t check the mirror.

When I stepped outside, the sky was just beginning to pale. Cool air hit my face like a slap. I crossed the gravel drive to my car, opened the door, and looked back on instinct.

He was standing in the window, arms crossed, watching me.

Later that morning, HQ felt like a war zone. Phones rang constantly, printers jammed, and tension simmered in every corner. I was at my desk, adjusting the layout of a press deck, when word came down:

Richard had been called into a council subcommittee session.

Something about misuse of resources, canvassing team costs, data center expenses.

He was gone before I got a chance to see him.I hadn’t even sat down before the press inbox lit up like a fire alarm.

Volunteers. Dozens of them. Complaints pouring in. Someone had leaked an internal spreadsheet to a public press contact list, names, addresses, phone numbers, emergency contacts. Every bit of sensitive information we’d promised to protect.

I stared at the screen, heart in my throat.

Adam arrived within seconds, the scent of smugness preceding him.

“That wasn’t your batch, was it?” he asked casually. “You were still on that rotation last week.”

I shut the laptop lid calmly. “Only when I’m the one logging in and sending it. Which I wasn’t.”

He shrugged. “Just making conversation. Stress does weird things to people.”

My smile didn’t touch my eyes. “If you’re insinuating something, you should be smart enough to back it up with data.”

He smirked. “Of course.”

He walked off, but the damage was done. Eyes slid away when I looked around. Conversations stopped when I entered rooms. People who used to ask for my input now avoided direct questions. At the debrief, no one sat beside me.

I stayed composed. Kept my notes organized. Nodded in the right places.

After the meeting, I passed Nathan in the hallway. He didn’t say a word, just slipped a folded piece of paper into my palm as we crossed paths.

I opened it in the stairwell.Internal access logs. Compare timestamps. Two days ago. Quietly.

A USB drive was clipped to the bottom. My pulse spiked.

That night, I waited until the office cleared out. The building fell quiet one light at a time. I made myself a cup of stale coffee, just to stay sharp. Then I slipped into the server room.

The air was cold, humming with static. I logged in and opened the logs, heart pounding. The files Nathan gave me were clean and specific. My credentials had been used. My account accessed things I hadn’t touched. Someone was ghosting me from the inside.

I didn’t hear the door open. But I felt the change in the air.

Richard stepped beside me, silent. He looked at the screen without speaking. The flickering monitor lit the hard lines of his face.

We worked.

And somehow, that felt more intimate than anything else we’d done all week. Amelia I kept our encrypted messages on a second drive. Just in case. Not on a laptop. Not on the server. Instead, I tucked the data chip into the bottom of a hollow lipstick tube, mattered, the kind Jenny used to wear. It felt ridiculous, how theatrical it was. But the best hiding places always were. No one would think twice about it sitting at the bottom of a makeup bag. And if they did, if they somehow found it, they’d need a retinal scan and a voiceprint to even begin to touch what it held.

That tube stayed in the small zipper pouch inside my purse, always in reach, always on me.

I didn’t trust the system anymore. The walls were starting to hum with secrets, and I had the growing, awful feeling that someone was always just behind me, just out of frame, listening in.

I could feel eyes I couldn’t see. We’d said we’d stop, Richard and I. We had promised ourselves distance, logic, discipline. A clean break. And we held to it, for two whole days. Forty-eight hours of silence stretched like barbed wire between us.

At lunch on the third day, I sat at a high-top table in the lounge, picking through a protein bar and pretending to read donor analytics.

A new intern slid into the seat beside me with a boldness only the oblivious could muster. All teeth and too much cologne.

“You always eat alone?” he asked, grinning like he already knew the answer.

I didn’t bother hiding my sigh. “Depends on the company.”

He laughed, like l’d complimented him. “I’m Emmett. Finance. Here for all your spreadsheet needs.”

I turned slightly toward him, more out of habit than interest. “That supposed to be a pickup line?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” he said, biting into his sandwich. “Look, I’m just saying, if someone as intimidatingly hot as you wants to grab a drink sometime, I’d be a fool not to ask.”

Before I could answer, a shadow passed behind him. Richard.

Clipboard in hand, phone to his ear. He didn’t look at me. Didn’t break stride. Just walked past like I didn’t exist. But I saw it, the flex of his jaw, the way his fingers clenched tighter around the clipboard like hewanted to snap it in half. That was all I needed.

“They think we’re vulnerable,” I said, flipping open my notepad.

He nodded. “They’re right. You’ve had leaks. Internal tension. They’re hoping to ride that unrest straight through our defenses.”

“Do we know how many?”

“Not exact numbers. But enough to matter. Enough to get attention if they push too hard.”

I wrote everything down, coordinates, behavior patterns, phrases he’d intercepted. The language was organized. Precise. This wasn’t random chaos. This was planning.

Back at HQ, I went straight to Richard. We shut ourselves in his office and didn’t come out for hours. We rebuilt the campaign’s safety statement from scratch, calculated, steady, sharp without sounding alarmist.

We didn’t touch. Barely looked at each other. But our movements were synchronized. Our edits passed between us like breath.

When we finished, we submitted it through the secure channel.And the next morning, a completely different version went live.

It was vague. Watered down. Useless. Council panic flared by midmorning. The phones wouldn’t stop ringing.

I stormed into Nathan’s office.

“Who else had access to the draft?” I demanded.

He didn’t hesitate. Just handed me a printed log.

My name. Richard’s. Emma. Tasha. The comms manager.

And at the bottom, Jason.

Jason, who wasn’t supposed to have access to anything. Jason, who had burned bridges and betrayed allegiances. Jason, whose name should’ve been deleted.

I stared at the page. Fury spread through me like fire under skin.

I folded the list, tucked it into my jacket pocket, and left the room without another word.

Enough tiptoeing. Enough secrets.

I was going to find out how far this sabotage went.

And I was going to bury him for it.