All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

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

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

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

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

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