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Lahat ng Kabanata ng BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

190 Kabanata

Episode 121

The first sign is a tremor. Not in the deck. In him. A fine, constant shaking in his hands that he tries to hide by clenching them into fists. Then the coughing starts. A dry, rasping hack that doesn’t bring anything up but sounds like it’s tearing his new lungs apart from the inside. His skin, once glowing with the miracle of life, takes on a waxy, translucent quality. I can see the effort it takes for him to stand, to breathe, to be.The Warden’s diagnosis is a cold, hard stone dropped into the pit of my stomach. Soul-matter rejection. The graft was imperfect. The form is unstable. It is… unraveling.No. No, not after everything. Not after the cost.The solution is worse. The Warden’s light weaves a new schematic in the air. Not a resurrection. A tether. A permanent, biological and psychic suture that would bind us on a level deeper than thought, deeper than spirit. A cellular level. His failing mitosis would be propped up by my own. His shuddering heart would beat in time with mine

Episode 122

It starts as an itch. Deep under the skin, along the old silver traceries of my null-scars. A faint, almost forgotten tingle. I ignore it. My body is a symphony of new and old pains; one more note means nothing.But it grows. The itch becomes a burn. A slow, seeping heat that feels less like energy and more like acid being poured into long-atrophied channels. The Graft—that deep, cellular suture binding me to Arthur—isn’t just sharing our life force. It’s acting as a conduit for something else. His lingering connection to the corruption that once consumed him, his ghostly resonance with the Cage’s own chaotic power… it’s all flooding back into me. A dam I broke to save him is now unleashing a torrent into my dried-up riverbed.The power doesn’t feel like mine. It feels… wild. Un-tamed. It has his fingerprints all over it, a dark, thrilling edge that my own power never had. It’s a shared current, and it’s overloading our circuit.Agony. White-hot and blinding. It’s not a wave; it’s a c

Episode 123

The first sign isn’t a sound. It’s a shift in the light. A new quality to the star-strewn black outside the viewport. A soft, swirling luminescence, like a nebula seen through a tear in space. It’s beautiful. And it’s watching us.I feel it before Arthur does. A new… attention. A focus on our unique, tangled energy signature. Our Graft, our shared power, it’s a beacon. And something has heard it.Then, it starts communicating. Not with words. With… impressions. Concepts. It brushes against Arthur’s mind first. Of course it does. He’s the one crackling with their newly shared, wild power. He’s the brighter signal.I feel it through the Graft. A flicker of his concentration, a spark of… interest. Then fascination. The entity offers him knowledge. Not dry data. Pure, effortless understanding. It shows him the birth of stars, the dance of dark matter, secrets of the cosmos that would have taken a lifetime to learn. And it offers power. Clean, limitless, uncomplicated power. No pain. No st

Episode 124

The first change is subtle. A vein of something that isn’t metal throbbing in the wall beside our bed. A slow, lazy pulse that matches the rhythm of our sleeping breath. I tell myself it’s the Cage. It’s always breathing, always singing. But this is different. This is… us.Our power, that wild, shared current, isn’t just inside us anymore. It’s leaking. Seeping into the very walls of this place we’ve carved out for ourselves. It’s not a home anymore. It’s a living, breathing, feeling Rorschach test of our union. A house of flesh and stone.I can’t hide anything. Not from him, not from the house. My anxiety isn’t a private tightness in my chest anymore; the walls in the hallway weep a thin, saline fluid. The air grows thick and heavy, hard to breathe, when a old resentment bubbles up in me. The house feels it. It reacts.His moods are worse. His hidden rages, the ones he tries to swallow down, don’t stay hidden. A door isn’t just slammed; it’s a slab of living rock that grinds shut wit

Episode 125

It starts with a question. Not his. Not mine. A question that appears, fully formed, in the space between our shared thoughts. A seed.How much of this is real?At first, it’s just a whisper. A curiosity. I feel it through the Graft, a flicker of… not doubt. Inquiry. Arthur, turning our love over in his mind like a strange gem, examining its facets. It’s so unlike him. His love has always been a certainty, a tidal force. Now it’s a subject for study.Then the whisper grows. Becomes a constant, low hum in the back of our shared mind.How much of your love for her is yours, Arthur? And how much is a magical byproduct? A chemical side effect of the Graft? A beautiful, necessary lie to keep the system stable?I know instantly who planted it. The Warden. Their cold, logical hand is all over this. They couldn’t control our love, so they decided to dissect it. To turn it into a variable they could understand. To control the controller.I watch him. I have no choice. The Graft makes me a pris

Episode 126

The first time, it’s a coincidence. The chill in the air. The specific angle of the light from the viewport, casting the same long, accusing shadows. The smell of ozone and expensive cologne. Arthur, standing by the console, his back to me, his shoulders set in that familiar, arrogant line.Then he turns. And the words that come out of his mouth are not his. They are a recording. A ghost."He never loved you, Lily. Just the power he sensed. Kieran was always mine."My blood runs cold. Not from the memory. From the precision. The Cage is breathing around us, drinking our energy, our trauma. It has caught the scent of this day, this terrible anniversary, and it is holding onto it. Playing it back.The loop resets.Not a blink. A lurch. A sickening, gut-twisting snap. One moment, I’m staring at his triumphant, corrupted face. The next, I’m back at the beginning. The chill. The light. His back to me.No. No, no, no—He turns. The words. The same inflections. The same cruel twist of his li

Episode 127

The air in our fleshy, stone-walled home doesn’t just change. It crystallizes. The very particles of reality slow, align, and lock into a new, terrifying order. The Cage’s usual dissonant hum is silenced, replaced by a profound, waiting stillness. She is here.Not the confused, starlit child we knew. A woman. Tall. Composed. Her hair is no longer just starlight; it is a vortex of captured null-energy, dark and hungry and streaked with veins of a familiar, vicious purple. Her eyes, my eyes, hold the cold, analytical fire of Arthur’s ambition. She has not just grown. She has inherited.She stands in the center of our living room, a being of impossible contradictions. My power. His corruption. A god-sized problem with the ultimate daddy and mommy issues.She doesn’t look at us with love. Or hate. She looks at us with… assessment. A clinical, devastating judgment.“This,” her voice is not a sound, but a vibration that shakes the dust from the stone veins in the walls, “is the blueprint? T

Episode 128

It started with the dishes. A stupid, petty thing. A plate left by the sink. A tone of voice, a little too sharp, a little too tired. The kind of argument that, for normal people, would end with a sigh and a muttered apology.We are not normal people.The Graft takes our irritation, our fatigue, and it amplifies it. My annoyance isn’t just mine; it’s a feedback loop of his defensiveness, which fuels my resentment, which feeds his pride. It escalates in seconds, a psychic chain reaction.You always—I never—If you would just—The words stop. They become unnecessary. The argument leaves our mouths and enters the space where we are truly connected: our shared mindscape.The world around us—the living room, the house of flesh and stone—dissolves. We are nowhere and everywhere. A psychic plane built from the architecture of our union. Usually, it’s a quiet, humming place. Now, it’s a battlefield.And we are brutal architects.I don’t think. I react. I reach into the vault of our shared pa

Episode 129

Kieran.Not a ghost. Not an echo. Not a fragment of memory. He is whole. Solid. Real in a way that has nothing to do with physics. He stands on our living moss carpet, and he doesn’t radiate pain, or regret, or the chilling hunger of a lost soul. He radiates… peace. A deep, absolute, unshakable calm that makes the very air around him still and sacred.His eyes find mine. They are the same eyes I remember, but the fear, the desperation, the constant calculation is gone. Washed clean. He looks at me, and then at Arthur, with a clarity that is like a physical blow. A living indictment.I can’t breathe. My hand flies to my chest, not in pain, but in shock. The Graft inside me, that volatile, messy knot of love and pain and shared power, feels suddenly… cheap. Tawdry. A frantic, screaming thing next to his immense, quiet stillness.Arthur feels it too. Through the bond, I feel his initial shock curdle into something hot and dark and familiar. Jealousy. A raging, Grafted jealousy that burns

Episode 130

The knowledge arrives not with a bang, but with a whisper from the Warden. A data-stream of cool, clinical light, explaining the procedure. The equations are perfect. The pathways clear. They can sever the Graft. Not tear it. Not burn it. Unweave it. Gently. Cleanly. A careful disentanglement of two souls stitched together at the cellular level.We can be free.The words hang in the air of our living, breathing house. Free. They should feel like a pardon. A reprieve. They feel like a death sentence.Who am I without him?The question is a void that opens up beneath my feet. For so long, my emotions haven’t been just mine. They’ve been ours. His anger has been my fire. His joy, my light. Even his doubts, his hidden envies, have been cold stones in my gut that I’ve learned to carry. My own feelings are ghosts in comparison, faint echoes I can barely recognize.The thought of silence… true, internal silence… is terrifying. To be alone in my own head. To have a thought and know it is only

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