Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 118

Chapter 118

Kieran POV

+10 Free Coms

I felt her before I saw her. It was going to take a while to get used to. I was still trying to figure out where the ordinary ended and the primal instinct began. But when the corridor doors opened and/Denise walke back into the reception, I knew before I saw it. There was a slight shift in the air.

She was composed and had a spring in her step. The kind that came after a weight had been shed off.

I had stayed back not because James was there, but because Dante was her history and going after him would have meant deciding that she needed rescuing.

And she was no damsel in distress.

She walked toward me and the bond did the thing it had been doing since the ceremony, which was to provide information I hadn’t asked for.

She was tired, triumphant and lighter at the same time.

I held out my hand, she looked at it for a beat before she took it.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes.” I stared at her, in my little time with her, I had learned yes usually meant fine, functioning and I’d rather not discuss it. This was none of those.

“Are you sure?”

She turned to me. “It had to be done.”

There was no point in asking what she said or what he had said. I didn’t ask what she had said back. Asking her would have meant asking her to give me access to something that had been hers alone.

“It’s finished?”

She considered the word. “For me.”

The history whatever it was, how long it was had ended on those footsteps as long as she was concerned, regardless of what Dante felt or thought.

The reception continued around us; someone passed with glasses. I registered it with the fleeting attention one paid to the weather. Denise held most of my attention in a way that felt total and yet so completely normal.

The bond had changed my awareness of her in ways I was still learning. When she shifted her weight, I noticed. When she took a breath, something in me responded. It wasn’t with the restraint I had been exercising for years but a quieter sense of alignment.

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14:43 Sat, Sep 19

Chapter 118

+10 Free Cons

She was here and I realized that the low teething ball of tension in my stomach had completely vanished.

I didn’t know what to do with that except stand beside her. She moved closer after a moment, reached out and rested her hand lightly on my sleeve.

I thought about it for a minute. I had made decisions concerning business deals, pack policies/but this one was heavier than that. After a tense moment, I offered my arm to her, not as a command or the automatic gesture of an Alpha but the invitation of a husband extended to his wife.

She accepted it and I thought about the walk down the aisle. Mrs. Adeyemi had brought her toward me when I stood at the altar. She was the steady presence that she anchored as she made her choice. There was no steady presence now but she closed the gap between us willingly.

I wasn’t sure she knew how much that mattered.

Callum appeared with a slight grin on his face. “Seeing as you are both alive, it’s safe to say the wedding was successful.”

Denise said. “That’s an extremely low bar.”

“I believe in achievable goals.”

She laughed and I felt it through the bond before I heard it and the room seemed slightly better than it had been a moment before.

I turned; she was speaking to Callum and she was holding his arm and teasing him about something. The giggle in her eyes told me she had come back.

She was back to herself despite Dante attempt at resurrecting a version of her that served his needs. She had returned as the version who had decided.

I swallowed a bit because she had decided for a man who was still carrying things she didn’t know about.

Rosaline caught her eye from across the room. She looked at Denise, then at me and raised her glass slightly. Denise responded with a real smile, the kind that reached the rest of her face and Rosaline turned

back to her conversation.

I watched that exchange and thought about how Rosaline patiently and consistently made room for Denise in a world that had not originally been built for her.

Denise never needed any savung; she had just needed people who didn’t treat her like she needed saving

She had found them, stood in a corridor, turned her back on a past that she had carried for years and then she had walked back into the room to take my arm.

I wasn’t the best man if I was being honest but I was the choice she had made,

I had been telling myself that I would tell her about Alyssa and Eli when the time was right, wedding had been my deadline but now her hand was on my arm as the reception went on.

I looked at her.

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