All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

The Warden is a terrible student.It’s not for lack of trying. They are devastatingly earnest. They follow our son around the garden with a datapad that has become entirely superfluous, their usual cold precision softened into a posture of rapt attention. The master is eight years old. The apprentice is an ageless entity of cosmic order. The world has tipped off its axis.“No,” our son says, his voice patient, in a tone I’ve heard him use with a stubborn puzzle. “You’re thinking about it. Don’t think. Just… feel it.”He’s trying to teach the Warden how to change the color of a single leaf. Not by command. By feeling it into being blue.The Warden stares at the leaf, their brow furrowed in an agony of concentration. I feel the effort radiating from them, a grinding of metaphysical gears. It’s the opposite of their nature. They are a being of dissection, of categorization. They don’t create. They curate. Now, my child, this little boy who once almost faded from existence because his ori

It started with the Squeaky Floorboard. The third step from the top, to be precise. It developed a consciousness, a petulant, insistent one. It demands tribute. Not blood or souls. A specific pattern of footfalls—two light, one heavy—or it wails a psychic squeal that gives us all a migraine. We comply. We have to. It’s a god.Then came the Goddess of Sudden, Unnamed Anxiety. She’s a flicker in the periphery, a cold draft down the spine. She doesn’t mean harm. She’s just practicing her domain. But her mere presence in a room can send a person into a spiral of dread over a forgotten dentist appointment or a misplaced set of keys. Arthur found me weeping in the pantry yesterday, overwhelmed by the certain, inexplicable feeling that I had left the oven on in a house I’d never lived in.They are everywhere. A God of the Particular Way Dust Motes Dance in a Sunbeam. A God of the Lingering Taste of Metal. A God of That One Word You Can’t Remember. They are born from the fallout—the Warden’s

The silence it left behind was a poison. We thought we’d won. We’d weakened it, driven it back to a beggar’s existence. We didn’t see the single, bitter seed it dropped as it retreated.It didn’t attack him. It didn’t need to. It just planted a thought. A tiny, dark splinter in the deep, fertile soil of our son’s mind.I see the change in the way he looks at me. A new distance. A question in his eyes that wasn’t there before. He pulls away from a hug, just a fraction, his small body stiff. He’s grappling with it. A theological crisis in an eight-year-old soul. The nature of his own existence.“Mom?” he asks one evening, not looking up from the simple block tower he’s building. His voice is too casual. “Was I… easy to love? When I was born?”The air in my lungs turns to ice. Arthur, across the room, goes perfectly still.“Of course you were,” I say, the words too fast, too bright. A lie of omission that feels like a brand on my tongue.He just nods, his little face solemn. He doesn’t b

The Warden doesn’t get up. They don’t rage. They… unravel.It starts at the edges. The crisp lines of their grey suit blur, bleeding into the air around them. The solid form becomes a smudge, a void. A hole in the world. It’s not black. It’s less than black. It’s the absence of everything. Of light, of sound, of feeling.It stands, or rather, the void where it was rises, and I feel it. A pull. A gentle, inexorable suction.The God of the Squeaky Floorboard lets out a final, petulant psychic squeak—and is silenced. Not destroyed. Erased. Its divine essence, its annoying, persistent will, is sucked into the void. The floorboard is just a floorboard now. Perfectly quiet. Perfectly still.The Hollowed Warden is not evil. Evil has passion, has desire. This is an absence. The end of all stories. The silence after the final note. It begins to walk, a slow, deliberate pace, and with every step, it cleanses. The whispering grass falls silent. The anxious, humming energy of the minor gods vanis

The draft didn’t die. It learned. It grew. It became a semi-sentient breeze, a whispering current that didn’t carry scents or sounds, but choices. The ones left behind. The doors never opened.I see the first one in the garden. A flicker in the corner of my eye. I turn, and there I am.But not me.This Lily stands straighter. Her eyes hold no softness, only a cool, calculating power. There are no laugh lines around her mouth, only a sharp, determined set to her jaw. She is a woman who never took Arthur’s hand. Who never became a vessel for cosmic regret. Who never softened her heart for anyone. She is pure, isolated potential. A queen of a sterile, silent universe.Our eyes meet.And I see it. The loneliness. A void so profound it makes the Hollowed Warden seem social. It’s in the way her gaze skitters over the garden, unable to appreciate the messy, chaotic beauty of it. It’s in the slight, almost imperceptible tremor in her perfectly still hands. She has everything I once thought I