Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 190

Simon didn’t mean for me to overhear.

I had just stepped past the war chamber threshold, quiet enough that no one turned. Liora was hunched over the long table beside him, her sharp fingers dancing across a digital readout while Simon stared at a blurry scan that pulsed in and out of resolution. He didn’t look up.

“It’s confirmed,” he said, voice low and tight. “These soldiers aren’t just enhanced. They’re immune.”

Liora didn’t flinch. “They used hybrid blood.”

He nodded. “Synthetically altered. They’ve isolated a strain from early hybrid test subjects, first and second generation. Someone’s been building this for decades.”

“Is it David?”

Simon hesitated. “Or his benefactors. But he’s using it now. We found one of the surviving test bodies. It wasn’t just drained. It was disected.”

My stomach turned, bile stinging the back of my throat. I stepped back before I could hear anything else, fingers curling into my palms until I felt skin break. They were doing it again, using us, dissecting us, repurposing what they didn’t understand.

I wasn’t even sure who I meant by “they” anymore. The Line between vampire aristocrats and werewolfseparatists had blurred into one long, blood-soaked betrayal. They were building weapons from our blood.

And somewhere in their blueprints, I was meant to be one of them.

That night, Serena returned to me.

I didn’t sleep so much as collapse. One minute I was lying in the sheets Richard had just straightened around me, and the next I was standing barefoot on stone, the wind howling through fractured archways as ash drifted like snow. Serena stood at the edge of the old battlement, her white gown whipped sideways by the wind.

“You left it unfinished,” she said without turning to face me.

“Left what unfinished?”

“The Keep.”

I knew it in the way you know a name you haven’t said in years, the Crimson Keep. The corridors bloomed with familiarity. The broken flagstones, the torn red banners, the scent of dust soaked with dried magic. Serena turned finally, her face pale and tired.

“Not every war ends with destruction. Some end in rebirth.

I woke with the name in my mouth. I knew I had to go.

The journey was short in distance but brutal on my body.

My legs shook under me by the time I reached the ruins,and my heart kept missing beats in a way that made my chest tighten and my ears ring. Liora had helped me slip away with only two guards. She said it was about clarity. I hadn’t told her was blacking out.

The Keep had been bombed to ruins during the last great war, its archives torched and battlements shattered. But the foundation still stood. I wandered through charred doorframes and toppled pillars, guided more by instinct than direction. When I stepped into what used to be a ceremonial chamber, the air went thin. My breath caught.

My teeth ached. The stone floor vibrated under my feet.

The phrase was etched into the wall.

THE BRIDGE WHO BIRTHS THE DAWN.

The letters weren’t painted or carved with tools. They were embedded into the stone itself, glowing faintly beneath the surface. The moment I touched the words, the chamber pulsed. My body reacted before my brain could process it. A thread of heat ran through my veins like wire pulled taut. My knees buckled beneath me.

And then it hit.

It wasn’t a vision in the usual sense. It felt more like falling backward through someone else’s memories.

Wolves chanted in dialects I had only read about.

Vampires bound their blood with silk and bone. Serena appeared younger and hollow-eyed, cradling a newborn.

He laughed, but it was hollow. He dropped his hands to his thighs and stared at the floor before meeting my eyes again.

“If something happened to you, I would tear the entire system apart. I don’t care whose legacy it ruins or what treaties it breaks. None of it matters if I lose you.”I blinked. “You would really do that?”

“Of course would.”

He leaned dowirand kissed my cheek, then my temple, then the corner of my mouth. Slowly.

“Something’s happening to me,” T whispered. “I think Simon is more worried than he wants me to think.”

He touched my abdomen with the back of his hand, careful and uncertain. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. But I felt something in my dream. At the Keep. In the vision. They weren’t just talking about peace.

They were talking about creation. And I think that’s what

I’m becoming. A vessel for something new.”

He exhaled slowly, like he was trying to hold everything inside of him with breath alone.

“We’ll figure it out. Or-you will. You always do. You run circles around me in that department. You really do amaze me.”

I curled into his chest, and he let me. He wrapped his arms around me like he was trying to memorize the shape of my body.

And just before sleep took me, I felt it again, that subtle twist under my ribs. Like something alive and watching, just beneath the surface.