Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

DENISE

:

នគ

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I looked at him. He looked back at me, and there was something in his expression that was more complex than it appeared-not possessiveness exactly, though that was always in it, but something adjacent to unease. The morning had not gone the way he’d planned it. I had been useful and warm and organized and he hadn’t been able to object to a single thing I’d done, and that had sat wrong with him in a way he hadn’t been able to name in front of Elena.

Now he wanted the drive. Wanted the twenty minutes of enclosed space where he could recalibrate, could say something that would reestablish the usual order of things, could remind both of us of the specific geography of our arrangement.

I was not getting in that car.

I glanced past him, into the sitting room at the end of the hall, where the warm sounds of Elena and her friends finishing the morning’s work drifted through the half-open door. Fabric swatches rustling, someone laughing at something, the particular comfortable noise of women who were at ease with each other.

“One second,” I said to Dante, and before he could respond I stepped past him toward the sitting room.

I pushed the door open slightly.

Elena looked up immediately, her expression brightening when she saw me. “Denise—are you heading off?”

“I am, but I just wanted to say-” I glanced back into the hallway, at Dante who had followed to the doorway, and then back at Elena with an expression of warm, slightly conspiratorial pleasure, like I was delivering good news on someone else’s behalf. “Dante was just telling me -he wants to take you out tonight. A proper dinner. He said he’s been meaning to plan something romantic but the week got away from him, and he wanted to make it tonight.” I smiled. “I think he was going to tell you himself, but since I’m going, I didn’t want it to get lost.”

Elena turned to look at Dante. Her face did exactly what I had anticipated-it opened, the way faces did when they received something they wanted and hadn’t expected. The slight brightness in her eyes, the smile coming up before she’d quite decided to let it.

“Dante,” she said, softly, in the way you said a name when it meant something to you.

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Chapter 12

There was a pause behind me of approximately two seconds.

“Seven o’clock,” Dante said.

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His voice was completely smooth. Whatever was happening underneath it, the surface was controlled-because it always was, because that was what he was, and the Blackwood heir did not fumble in front of an audience. “I’ll have a reservation made. Wear the blue dress.”

Elena laughed, pleased. “You remember the blue dress?”

“I remember everything,” he said.

It landed the way he intended it to-romantic, attentive, the devotion that the whole pack had been celebrating in comment sections all week. Elena crossed the room and kissed him on the cheek and told him he was wonderful, and Dante received this with the ease of a man in his

correct context.

I was already stepping back toward the entrance hall.

“I’ll see myself out,” I said to no one in particular. “Elena, the Voss appointment is confirmed for tomorrow at ten. I’ll send photos by noon.”

“You’re the best,” she called after me.

I kept moving.

The front door closed behind me and I stood on the top step of the Blackwood estate and breathed in the outside air-cooler than inside, carrying the smell of the garden and the distant trees and the particular cleanness of wealth-adjacent space where nothing was allowed to decay.

My phone showed the Uber four minutes out.

I walked down the front steps and followed the driveway toward the gate, not rushing, my shoes quiet on the stone. Behind me, the house was solid and enormous and full of people who had no idea what I’d just done inside it or what I intended to do before the week was out.

I could feel the morning sitting on me the way costumes sat on you after a long performance -slightly heavy, slightly warm, the residue of sustained pretense. But underneath it, cleaner than I’d felt in weeks, was something I was cautious about naming in case naming it made it fragile.

The thing about hitting the bottom was that it clarified the floor. I knew where I stood now. I

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 12

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knew it with the precise, geographic certainty of someone who had walked the same route so many times that they no longer needed to look at the ground. Dante had left me in a burning car. He had cancelled my resignation without asking. He had shown up at my door before I’d had breakfast and collected me like an asset he was managing. He had stood at the foot of his estate staircase and tried to fold me back into a shape that was convenient for him.

And Lyra had cornered me in a bathroom with her two attendants and said I was nothing.

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