Claimed by My Bestie's Alpha Daddy novel Chapter 205

A woman ran down the sidewalk, her shoes slapping the concrete. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide with fear. “Lia! Baby,”

She stopped when she saw me beside her daughter. Her eyes snapped to my face, then dropped to the open case and the syringe in Simon’s hand. Her entire stance tensed, like she was one breath away from bolting. “What are you doing to her?”

“She’s not hurt,” I said, rising slowly.”But something triggered a trance. The tower chime is setting something off in her system. We can bring her out of it, but we need to move fast.”

“She’s four,” the woman said, her voice breaking. “What kind of sick programming does that to a toddler?”

“It’s not about how old she is,” I said gently. “It’s about what someone had access to. But we can help her before it gets worse.”

The woman reached out and pulled the girl from Richard’s arms with shaking hands. “You think I don’t know what happens to kids who get flagged? Someone reports her, and next thing we know she’s a ward of the state. Or worse.”

“She’s not a label. She’s your daughter. And no one gets to do anything unless you say so. Not me, not Simon, not any agency. That’s your decision.”She still looked unconvinced, but her feet stayed planted and her grip tightened around her daughter.

I stepped closer. “You know her best. You’ve seen what she’s like when she’s okay. If something’s wrong, you’re the first person who would know. But none of that matters unless you believe your voice still counts.”

The girl made a tiny sound, a twitch, a faint gasp, a flicker of breath against her mother’s shoulder.

That tiny shift was enough to fracture whatever fear she’d been clinging to. The woman’s face broke, just slightly, and she turned to Simon. “Help her.”

All they need is access.”

Richard looked away from the tower, his jaw set. His voice stayed calm, but something in it was terrified. “We rip out every node, every relay, every wire. I don’t care how deep it goes. We shut it all down before they even think about trying this in the city.”

The little girl Simon had treated was tugging gently at her mother’s coat, her eyes flicking back toward the tower with wary confusion. I watched her press her face into her mother’s side and look up one last time with a kind of mistrust that didn’t belong in someone so young.

I followed Richard to the SUV. Neither of us spoke, and there was no need to.This wasn’t just a town with a problem. It was a trap, stretched across rooftops and buried in speaker wires. I kept seeing that girl’s blank face and the pigeons snapping to attention, and I realized we’d only just begun to see how far the programming had already spread.