Claimed by the Alpha I Hate – Episode 29
Lucien crossed the mansion grounds without disturbing a single alarm. Wolf patrols searched for scent and sound, but vampire movement left little of either when guided by patience. The open upper window was exactly where his earlier surveillance predicted.
He entered the Alpha bedroom as little more than a shift in darkness. Daisy slept facing the connecting office, one hand curled near her pillow. Nolan’s presence waited only a wall away.
Lucien studied the young woman Klaudius called his daughter. She looked neither like a weapon nor an heir to a fading vampire court. Yet power moved beneath her skin in restless pulses, answering the full moon.
Taking her immediately would be reckless. Daisy’s awakening had thrown an Alpha across a gym, and the mate bond could alert Nolan the moment fear broke her sleep. Lucien needed her weakened first.
He removed a dark stone etched with old symbols. The object had been prepared to suppress newly awakened vampire power, locking instinct behind the same barriers that had concealed it for years.
Lucien sat on the edge of the bed and held the stone above Daisy’s chest. A faint red light gathered beneath its surface. Daisy shifted, sensing an unfamiliar presence without fully waking.
In the office, Nolan opened his eyes. The mate bond had gone strangely quiet—not severed, but muffled, as though a door were closing between him and Daisy. He rose from the couch.
Lucien whispered words in an ancient language. The stone drew darkness from Daisy’s veins and folded it inward. Her sharpened senses dimmed; the force that had awakened in the gym retreated beyond her reach.
Daisy dreamed of the moonlit forest again, but this time mist swallowed the path. Nolan stood on the other side, calling her name while an unseen hand pulled her backward.
She tried to answer and found no voice. The connection between them narrowed until Nolan’s image became a distant shadow. Panic stirred beneath sleep.
The bedroom door opened. Lucien extinguished the stone and moved before Nolan crossed the threshold. By the time the Alpha entered, curtains shifted beside an apparently closed window.
Nolan scanned the room. Daisy remained asleep, but her scent had changed, flattened by something cold and unfamiliar. He checked the window and found no intruder on the grounds below.
“Daisy.” He touched her shoulder. She did not wake immediately, and the delay sent alarm through him. Her pulse remained steady, yet the mate bond offered almost nothing.
Lucien clung beneath the exterior ledge, listening. He had not completed every layer of the seal, but the power was locked deeply enough to leave Daisy vulnerable. Remaining longer would invite a fight before he chose the terms.
Nolan lifted Daisy partly upright. Her eyelids fluttered, and she murmured his name without waking. Relief came with suspicion; she was alive, but someone had touched the connection between them.
He summoned the guards and ordered the mansion searched from roof to cellar. No one reported a breach. The absence of evidence confirmed rather than eased his fear.
Lucien reached the forest and opened his hand. The stone now held a faint trace of Daisy’s power, enough to prove to Klaudius that he had found her. He smiled at the captured light before hiding it away.
Back in the bedroom, Nolan remained beside Daisy until her breathing deepened. He could not explain why waking her felt dangerous, so he settled her against the pillows and kept watch.
Before dawn, a security alarm drew him downstairs to investigate another false trail Lucien had planted. Nolan left reluctantly, ordering two guards to remain outside the room.
Daisy slept on, unaware that her power had been sealed or that a vampire had stood beside her bed. When morning came, the first thing she would notice was not the silence inside her blood, but the empty place where she expected Nolan to be.