Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 80

The interview room is sterile and small, a windowless box with two chairs, a table, and a sweating pitcher of water I don’t touch.

“State your name.”

I do.

“How often do you access Alpha-level devices?”

“I don’t.”

“You were logged near the server corridor last Thursday.”

“The elevators were down. I took the stairs. I had hard copies for Policy.

I didn’t enter any restricted area.”

“Do you communicate with anyone off-network?”

“No.”

The questions keep coming, names of people l’ve interacted with after hours: Emma, Nathan, the print vendor. Then:

“Are you seeing anyone romantically?”

My spine stiffens. “I’m not discussing my personal life.”

They scribble something in a folder, but don’t look up right away. One of them taps a pen against the edge of the folder and says,

“You hesitated when we asked about your personal life.”

“Because it’s not relevant to the leak,” I say, keeping my voice even.

The other soldier raises an eyebrow. “You’re spending a lot of after-hours time here. Any reason we should be concerned about how close you are to the Alpha?”My throat tightens, but I hold the stare. “No. There’s no reason for concern.”

They finally look up. “You’re free to go.”

The office looks exactly the same when I return, but it doesn’t feel the same. It feels like walking back into a room where someone has read your diary and then closed it just before you walked in.

I sit down and open my drawer. Everything is wrong. Pens are out of place, folders crooked. Nothing’s missing, but everything’s been touched.

I file a report. Security says they searched the room and tells me it probably wasn’t personal.

It feels personal.

I stay late. The office empties slowly, lights switching off row by row.

The air conditioner kicks on and off, louder without the usual buzz of voices to cover it. I’m still typing when the door opens.

Richard.

He closes the door quietly behind him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.

“I could say the same to you.”

“They asked if you leave after me,” I say. “They’re trying to build a timeline.”

“I told them we keep opposite hours.”

I stand, stretching my arms. The tension between us sharpens in the low light.

“They went through my drawers,” I say. “It wasn’t random.”He steps closer. “Until this calms down, don’t trust anyone except Nathan.”

“Not even Emma?”

“Emma has too many loyalties.”

We stand in silence, and through the walls we can hear the muffled hum of voices, someone laughing faintly in the hallway.

“I shouldn’t still want you,” I say, my voice barely a whisper.

He doesn’t say anything. Just steps forward and kisses me, like that’s the only answer he has left to give.

It’s fast and rough, like something that’s been waiting too long. He lifts me onto the desk and kisses me like the world’s ending and we’re the only ones who know it. I don’t stop him. I can’t. His hands are steady.

Mine are shaking.

Footsteps.

He moves quickly, pulls me down, and guides me under the desk just as the doorknob jiggles. A key scrapes the lock but doesn’t catch.

I’ve been calling it lazy since March.*

Nathan flipped a few more pages and frowned. “This looks like someone tried to retrofit your work after it left your hands. I’ll check the version history and document access logs, and if someone’s altering internal docs, we’ll find out.”

*Find out fast, and quietly.”

He nodded, suddenly more serious. “You think it’s internal?”

I think someone is leaking, or trying to make it look like someone is.”

Later that afternoon, Jenny breezed into the break room like she owned it and plucked a scone from the pastry box without looking at anyone.

“Adam’s weirdly informed lately,” she said to no one in particular, though her eyes flicked toward me before she bit into the scone.

I stirred my coffee and said nothing, because I knew better than to take the bait.

He was. He always seemed to know what room Richard would be in before the rest of us did. He asked pointed questions in strategy meetings like someone had handed him the summary notes hours before, and he referenced Council debates that hadn’t aired yet. He kept watching me, too, not openly and not aggressively, but like he was waiting to catch me doing something.

That night, Richard texted me at 9:17 p.m.: Press draft is a mess. Need a second set of eyes. You around?

I considered pretending I wasn’t, then I grabbed my coat and walked down the hall to the empty press office, locking the door behind me.

The room felt overly bright under the fluorescents, and the press drafts scattered across the table looked like a parody of official language.

‘Sustainable cross-sector coordination’ sounds like something we’d say right before a military coup,” I muttered, crossing it out with a red pen.

Richard leaned back in his chair, watching me with that unreadable expression he used when I was working and he didn’t want to interrupt it.

“Do you want to rewrite the whole thing?” he asked eventually.

*I want to rewrite our entire communication strategy, but I’ll settle for this paragraph.”

“You’re tense.”

“No shit.”

He didn’t push. He just let the silence stretch between us as I paced, flipping the pen between my fingers and feeling the weight of every breath.