Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 194

Simon called me down to his lab an hour after sunrise. I hadn’t slept. I couldn’t, not with the echo of her voice still caught in my ears, sharp and unfinished, a reminder I couldn’t get rid of.

Not after seeing the way she’d pressed her palms to the barrier with quiet, calculated focus, like she was testing it for weaknesses. She hadn’t been trying to escape. Shed been watching him. Studying him. Planning something I hadn’t had the tools to name.

When I walked in, Simon was already hunched over three monitors, sleeves shoved to his elbows, a half-drunk mug of something bitter and black sitting at the edge of the desk. His fingers moved with tense precision over the keyboard, adjusting timestamps and dragging data clips with medical urgency.

The lab was quiet in the wrong way. Too focused. Every soft click of a key landed like a warning. It reminded me of the silence that came before a Pack kill, when the air was full of breath that hadn’t been released yet, every limb braced for impact, every muscle coiled to break.

Two of the screens displayed medical data. One showed her vitals from the fortress, the moment we’d pulled her out. The second tracked her collapse in the council chamber, when we still thought her body was just shutting down from stress. The third monitor displayed surveillance audio: raw waveform data stretched over atimestamp that pulsed with threat.

“What am I looking at?” I asked, though I already had a feeling. Something inside me had already begun to tighten.

Simon didn’t look up. “Three sources. Fortress vitals.

Infirmary logs. Audio from the lower wing. All locked to the second she changed. I synced the times from three separate servers.”

I stepped beside him, leaning forward without meaning to. Her ECG showed a sudden shift, her heartbeat locking into a strange 3:2 rhythm that was too exact to be natural.

Her EEG spiked in a way that looked more like an electrical circuit than anything biological. It wasn’t wol, it wasn’t hybrid. It didn’t belong to any category we knew. It looked like something had taken over. Like someone had reached inside and flipped a switch, rerouting her from instinct to instruction.

“That’s when she switched?”

“One second she was herself. The next, she wasn’t there.”

I tried to keep my breathing even. “You think it’s neurological?”

“That’s what I thought,” Simon muttered. He scrolled to another tab. “Then I saw this.”

He tapped a key. Static came through the speakers. Then a faint scuff of sound. Then the chime, three notes. The firsttwo were even. The third was off. It was too sharp. I froze.

My pulse jumped before I knew what I was reacting to. I didn’t even realize I’d stepped back from the desk until my heel clipped the base of the stool.

“That’s it,” Simon said. “Right there. Her EEG spikes. Her ECG locks in. Her motor responses flatten out and then reset.”

He pulled up the spectrogram. The final note was a jagged spike against the background. A faultline carved through sound.

“I’m calling it Bell Nine. That sharp end note? I found it on directional mics, ambient pickups, even a vibration sensor under the floor. It’s clean. It’s unmistakable. And it’s the same every time.”

I kept staring. “So it wasn’t the blood.”

Simon shook his head. “It wasn’t you. She didn’t come back because of you. She stopped because of the bells.”

He opened another file. “This is from the capital’s tower relay.” He clicked again. The chime played. Softer, distant, but still exact. Still the same. Still surgical.

“Tracking vitals. Bond shifts. Emotional responses. But if this is how she’s wired, if they built this into her, none of those things matter anymore. She doesn’t need to feel anything. She just needs to hear that sound.”

Nathan’s voice was quiet now. “If she’s the first, there will be others. Maybe there already are, and we won’t be able to track their warning signs.”

Simon pulled the waveform apart again. “I’ll isolate the sequence. If it’s been used elsewhere, I’ll find it. But this wasn’t the result of trauma. This wasn’t fear conditioning, it was architecture.”

I nodded, but it didn’t feel like agreement. It felt like surrender.

“No one hears about this. Not the Council. Not the other packs Alphas. No one outside this room. Not until we know how deep it goes. Because if this gets out, they’ll kill her before we can explain what it means.”

Nathan’s jaw clenched. “And if they hesitate, David won’t.He’ll use it to rehabilitate his image. He’ll say he knew all along. He’ll call it prophecy. He’ll make her the threat he’s always claimed she was.”

I could already see it, his smug traitorous face on every screen, the council chamber echoing with half-truths, Amelia’s name ripped apart by headlines. Her collapse rewritten as an assassination attempt. Her body treated like evidence. The woman I loved reduced to a talking point in a war I never wanted to fight.

The lab felt smaller, the air colder, the hum of the servers too loud. I stared at the spectrogram still glowing across the screen, the spike of Bell Nine etched into the data like a countdown we’d failed to stop.

My hands were still shaking. I didn’t know if it was because I was afraid for her or because I was starting to fear what I might be capable of to keep her safe. But either way, the fear was real, and I hated it. I hated how familiar it felt. I hated that it was mine.