Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

DENISE

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“Post them, and they don’t humiliate me. They humiliate you. Because I was sixteen, and you were older, and there is a film of what you did to me before those photographs-someone’s phone caught the audio. I kept that too.”

The silence was a different kind now.

“You’ll be branded the bully,” I said. “The Alpha’s sister who organized the harassment of an orphan omega at a school academy. In this climate, with the way packs are talking about omega rights, about how omegas are treated-that story doesn’t make me look pathetic. It makes me look like a survivor. And it makes you look like exactly what you are.”

Lyra’s face had gone to something I hadn’t seen on it before in all the years I’d known her.

Uncertainty.

“Did the brain skip you in the family?” I asked, and I heard my own voice come out almost conversational about it, like I was genuinely curious, like I was asking about the weather. “Because it really seems like it might have. What a shame. Dante got the strategy and the looks and you got-“I gestured mildly at the room, at the situation, at the two women behind her who were no longer filling the space with the same energy they’d entered with. “This.”

She took a step forward, her hand coming up.

I caught her wrist.

Not roughly. Clean and precise, the same way I caught things that fell off desks before they hit the floor-reflexively, with certainty, before the other person had registered that I was moving. Her wrist was thin in my hand and she froze, because I didn’t think she’d ever, in the entirety of our history together, experienced me not flinching.

I held her gaze.

“There is also,” I said, very quietly now, just between us, “a possibility that I am carrying your brother’s child.”

The blood left her face.

I watched it happen-the color draining, the calculation scrambling, the whole careful

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 11

45

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architecture of her contempt destabilizing at its foundation. Behind her, Priya made a sharp sound like something had knocked the air out of her.

“That makes me untouchable,” I said. “Not because of sentiment-Dante isn’t sentimental, we both know that. But because the politics of it are too complicated. An Alpha’s potential heir, in an omega’s body, right before a mating ceremony? The council would have opinions. Elena’s family would have opinions. The entire region would have opinions.” I released her wrist. “So I would think very carefully, Lyra. Very carefully. Before you do anything else in my direction.”

I picked up my bag from the counter.

“Good talk,” I said.

I walked to the door. Cass stepped aside without my having to ask. I opened it, stepped out into the hallway, and pulled it gently closed behind me.

My hands were completely steady.

That surprised me, slightly-not because I hadn’t meant everything I’d said, but because the part about the pregnancy was a lie and I had not known, until the words were already out of my mouth and past retrieving, whether I could deliver it without my voice changing. Apparently I could. Years of performing composure had made it load-bearing.

I was not pregnant.

I was as confident of that as I was of anything-I’d been on the pills without interruption, had taken them with the grim discipline of someone who understood exactly what an unplanned pregnancy would mean in her position. But Lyra didn’t know that. And more importantly, Lyra didn’t know what I knew, which was that the possibility alone, in this political context, right before this mating ceremony, would be catastrophic enough to make her hesitate.

Hesitation was all I needed from her.

I didn’t need her to like me. I didn’t need her to back down permanently-she wouldn’t, that wasn’t in her nature, and I understood her nature by now the way you understood weather patterns in a place you’d lived too long. I just needed her off balance long enough for me to get out. Out of this house, out of this city, out of the reach of all of them.

I was almost at the stairs.

The second floor corridor of the Blackwood estate was lined with framed photographs- family portraits, significant occasions, the visual record of a bloodline that had been proud of itself for a very long time. I didn’t look at them. I’d looked at them once, years ago, on a night

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 11

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when Dante had brought me here under different pretenses, and I’d stood in this hallway and imagined, with the specific stupidity of a girl who hadn’t yet learned better, that I might someday belong in a frame on this wall.

I walked past them without turning my head.

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