Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 196

Simon didn’t waste time with apologies or protocol. He entered the conference room already mid-motion, the tablet in his hand aglow with clinical overlays and jagged scan results.

He looked like a man walking in from a storm, soaked through with certainty. His jaw was tight, and his gaze didn’t waver as he marched to the head of the table.

He didn’t ask if we had time, didn’t warm us up with qualifiers, he just set the tablet on the table, turned it so could see, and spoke in the kind of tone that only followed Sleepless nights and conclusive evidence.

“Counter-frequencies won’t work,” he said. “Not in any lasting way.”

I leaned in slowly, eyes adjusting to the clusters of red lines and overlaid graphs. The data was dense and incomprehensible at a glance, but something about the slope of the lines told me enough. I could read distress patterns, misfiring circuits in her brain, rhythmic loops that no longer resembled a hybridor a wolf. “You mean she’s not flickering between selves anymore?”

Simon met my eyes without hesitation. “I mean she’s not flickering at all. What we’re seeing isn’t a conflict of identity, it’s a full replacement. The conditioned persona isn’t just in control; it’s the dominant framework now. The real Amelia isn’t piloting from beneath it. She’s buried under it.”Nathan let out a sharp exhale and pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. The force of his movement scraped the chair back a few inches. “So we’ve already lost her?”

“Not lost,” Simon said, turning toward him. “But suppressed. Deeply. This wasn’t hypnosis or a single implanted trigger. They installed a structural rewrite, a complete psychological repatterning with built-in redundancies and reinforcements. It’s not one suggestion on a loop, it’s a whole system. Self-sustaining. Self-correcting. And it’s made to look like her, sound like her, even move like her. But the emotional reflexes, the inştincts that should be hers, they’ve been overwritten.”

He flipped to another scan, this one showing what looked Like a layered heat map of Amelia’s brain. Bursts of red and yellow pulsed in the regions we normally monitored for reactive empathy, limbic recall, and identity anchors.

They were flatlined.

Instead, there were new peaks in unexpected zones, correlated with control, with obedience, and with maniputation.

“These readings show stable reinforcement zones where identity markers used to spike. They’ve been dampened and overridden. The active system replicates functionality while suppressing emotional reflex. It was meant to look real, but it’s not her.

I stared at the image, pulse beating louder in my ears, andpressed my fingers harder into the table’s edge. “So we can’t reach her?”

Simon hesitated, not long, but long enough to make it hurt. “Not by calming her. Not by triggering guilt. Not with silence or familiar phrases. Because this isn’t confusion, it’s clarity. The system is functioning exactly as it’s supposed to. It’s clean, efficient, and lethal.”

Nathan sat down again, his movements sharp with frustration. He looked like he wanted to punch a wall.”

Then how the hell do we undo it?”

Simon turned the tablet again, revealing a second set of scans. This time, he pulled up audio waveforms matched against EEG and hormone spikes. “Overwriting is the only path forward. Not stabilization. Not containment.

Overwriting. We need to break the system itself, not pacify it.”

I kept my voice steady, though I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer. “And how do we do that?”

He tapped the side of the device. “We fracture it through contradiction, through internal shock. Specifically, memory-tied emotional disruption. Anything that can force her real consciousness to surface, even momentarily. The system was built on deep emotional recall.”

He flipped to a third file. This one showed biometric spikes, cortisol, neural oscillations, heart rate. A jagged pattern repeated three times across different dates.”This was recorded during three separate interactions,” he said. “All of them with you, Richard. And all of them during moments when your voice shifted registers. Only when you spoke from personal grief, personal guilt, and personal memory.

My chest tightened, it was confirmation. I’d known, in the quietest corners of myself, that I’d felt her stir during those moments. That her eyes didn’t stay blank when said things I hadn’t meant to say aloud. But hearing it now, seeing it on a screen, made it undeniable. “You’re saying I have to expose myself to her. Bleed all over her.”

Just me, in the dark, carrying the weight of my regrets like ballast. Nothing righteous about it.

Just the inevitable cost of what I let happen and what I refused to stop in time. The memories I’d buried, what I didn’t do, what I did too late, those were the only things that shook her conditioning. Not wisdom or love. Just grief I couldn’t process, guilt I hadn’t earned the right to release, and pain sharp enough to drown out everything else.I looked down at my hands and realized I was gripping the edge of the table too hard. My knuckles had gone white.

My palms were damp.

“Not when I commanded her,” I said aloud, though it wasn’t a question.

Simon shook his head. “Only when you remembered the real her. The girl who called you on your bullshit and didn’t care you were king. That’s the voice she hears.

That’s the voice they couldn’t kill.”

My throat burned as I nodded, the motion stiff with everything | was still trying to swallow. But it didn’t come without resistance. Part of me still wanted to turn back, to refuse the role entirely, to demand a new plan, one where I didn’t have to lay myself bare, one where I wasn’t the blade she had to push against to feel anything real. But that was cowardice, and we didn’t have time for cowardice.

So I would speak, even if she tore through every word. I would answer her, even if she spat back every lie they had drilled into her. And when her eyes locked on mine and didn’t blink, I’d keep going, not because I thought it would save me or fix her or erase what l’d done, but because somewhere in her, there was still a memory of the man who didn’t flinch when she was breaking. I owed it to that memory not to flinch now.

If I didn’t reach her, no one else would. And if I failed, it wouldn’t just be her we lost, it would be the whole damn kingdom we were pretending still had a future.