All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

I should look away. I should feel triumph. He’s unraveling. The Warden is cracking, and the Cage will crack with him. That’s what Arthur said would happen, and Arthur is rarely wrong. But my chest tightens instead, lungs pinched by some cruel hand. Because I know that look. I wore it once. The shadow of something loved and lost but erased, burned out so clean it leaves nothing but an echo of grief that has no name.I want to laugh at the irony, but the sound sticks in my throat.He turns suddenly, and for a breath I think he’s caught me. His gaze cuts across the hall like a blade, but there’s nothing behind it, no sharp suspicion, no triumph. Just hunger. Not for power, not even for survival. For memory. His lips twitch as though he almost says a name. Then he doesn’t.I retreat before the silence eats me whole.Back in the hollow of my room, Arthur waits. Always waiting. Always still, as though he is carved from patience itself. His hands folded, his face a mask of something like cal

The Resonance is not a quiet hum. It’s a live wire. A raw, exposed nerve connecting the three of us. There’s no off switch. No volume control.I’m watching our son practice. He’s trying to shape a piece of the new universe’s matter, to make a simple sphere. His brow is furrowed, his hands trembling with effort. He’s a being of immense potential, but he’s a child. A god-like child with emotional transparency.A thought flickers through my mind, unbidden, a tiny spark of doubt. *He’s struggling. What if he can’t control it? What if this new reality is too much for him?*The thought is mine. Private. Or it should be.The Resonance picks it up and broadcasts it. I feel it leave me, a ripple on a pond.Our son flinches as if struck. The half-formed sphere of light in his hands shatters into a thousand glittering shards. His face crumples. The doubt is no longer mine. It’s his. It’s been amplified, reflected back at him tenfold. My private fear has become his public reality.“I can’t do it,

The realization didn’t hit like a lightning bolt. It seeped in. Like a stain.It was in the way the light always fell just so during an argument, casting our shadows long and dramatic against the wall. It was in the way a sudden, perfectly timed silence would descend when one of us was about to confess a vulnerability. Our life had begun to feel… composed. Framed.Arthur and I had a disagreement over something stupid, something meaningless—a cracked cup, a forgotten chore. But the air thickened around us. The garden outside the window seemed to still, every leaf poised as if waiting for a line. Our voices, raised in frustration, echoed with a strange, theatrical quality. I found myself not just arguing, but *arguing*, my gestures broader, my words sharper, as if playing to some unseen balcony.And then I felt it. A faint, sickening pulse of satisfaction through the Resonance. Not from Arthur. Not from me. From somewhere else. An appreciation.We fell silent at the same time, the fight

The silence after the Curator left was the loudest sound I had ever heard. It was a physical presence, thick and real and utterly, blessedly empty. No whispered commentary. No orchestral swells. No tragic lighting.Just the quiet hum of a teakettle.Arthur was staring into his cup, his shoulders slumped not with the weight of a kingdom, but with the simple fatigue of a man who’d slept poorly. Our son was methodically spreading jam on a piece of toast, his brow furrowed in concentration over the mundane, crucial task of achieving even coverage.Nothing was happening.And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.For what felt like an eternity, we had been trapped in a masterpiece. The Curator, delighted with the "drama" of our lives, had decided to make us its magnum opus. It sculpted reality like clay. A simple breakfast wasn't just a meal; it was a Last Supper before a prophesied battle, the light falling through the window in perfect, sorrowful shafts. A minor disagree

The peace is a lie. A thin, fragile crust over a boiling ocean of our son’s divine boredom.I noticed it in small, sickening ways. The sky yesterday was a little too lavender. Not a natural twilight, but the color of a forgotten bruise, aesthetically pleasing and utterly wrong. Then I stepped on the grass and it sighed, a collective, whispering exhale of all the secrets it had ever kept. He walks in his sleep, the blades murmured about Arthur. She misses the noise, they confided about me.I found the bird by the weeping statue. It was a common sparrow, or it had been. Now it sat on a crystallized branch, its beak open, but instead of a chirp, it poured out a perfect, heartbreaking symphony. A composition of pure regret, each note the sound of a specific, lost chance. It was beautiful. It was a violation. A small life, rewritten into art without its consent.Arthur finds it fascinating. He stands for hours, listening to the bird, his head cocked, a scientist’s curiosity on his face. “T