Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

DANTE

I had brought her there to remind her of her place.

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That was the truth of it, stripped of the justifications I’d constructed on the drive over-the ones about Elena feeling guilty, about keeping the peace, about maintaining appearances. Those were real considerations, but they weren’t the reason I’d gone to Denise’s apartment at eight in the morning and collected her personally. The reason was simpler and less flattering: I had wanted her to see it. Elena in her house, in her space, surrounded by the life that was being built around her. I had wanted Denise to understand, with the specific clarity that only proximity could provide, what Elena was going to have and what she was not.

I had wanted to show her that I still cared for her, in my way—that I would still provide for her, that the arrangement didn’t have to end, that I was willing to be generous if she could simply accept the shape of things as they were rather than pushing against it. I would take care of her. I always had. That had to count for something.

What I had not accounted for was Denise.

I stood in the entrance hall after she’d gone and I tried to identify exactly what I was feeling, and the closest I could get was the specific discomfort of a man who had set up a chessboard very carefully and then watched his opponent play an entirely different game.

She had walked into that sitting room and become indispensable within the first twenty minutes. Not in the way of someone performing helpfulness-I knew what that looked like, I’d grown up watching subordinates perform helpfulness for my father, and it always had a texture of effort to it, a slight strain at the edges. Denise had been genuinely engaged. She’d looked at Elena’s mood boards and seen things the rest of them had missed. She’d made connections between details-the ring and the earrings, the centerpiece style and the venue proportions-that required actual attention, and she’d offered them without making anyone feel like they’d overlooked something obvious.

Elena had looked at her the way she looked at people she found valuable.

That had sat wrong with me in a way I hadn’t been able to examine directly while it was happening, because examining it would have required acknowledging that I’d brought Denise here for a particular purpose and she had quietly, efficiently, demolished that replaced it with something I hadn’t sanctioned.

purpose

and

And then she had looked at me from across the table, with that pleasant and utterly opaque

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 13

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expression, and said something about being a professional with no personal reasons to decline an order, and I’d heard exactly what she meant by it, which was the same thing she meant by everything she’d said all morning, which was: *you have no hold on me and I am going to keep reminding you of that until one of us breaks.*

The dinner I hadn’t planned was a consequence of that.

I couldn’t be angry about it. That was the worst part. I stood in the entrance hall of my family estate and turned the situation over and over looking for an angle where I could be legitimately aggrieved, and there wasn’t one, because she hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d helped my fiancée plan a wedding. She’d offered to go to a jeweler. She’d looked at my face when Elena thanked her and let me see, just briefly, something small and satisfied in her eyes before the pleasant mask came back down.

Then she’d put me in a dinner reservation.

I made the call from the hallway while Elena went back to her friends. The restaurant confirmed immediately-they always confirmed immediately for me, which was usually gratifying and today was simply a logistics requirement. Seven o’clock. Table for two. The private corner, the one by the window, where the city spread out below like something arranged specifically for the enjoyment of people at that table.

I had never taken Denise there.

That thought arrived before I could stop it and I set it aside where I couldn’t see it.

It was Priya’s voice I heard first, which was how I knew they weren’t aware I was in the hallway.

I’d come back from the kitchen with a second coffee and was passing the corridor that led to the back sitting room when the voices carried, indistinct at first and then suddenly very distinct, the way sound sharpened when your name or someone connected to your name was part of what you were hearing.

“-completely different person than I expected.”

“I know. She’s not what I remembered from the academy at all.” A pause I recognized as Cass. “Lyra looked like she’d seen a ghost when she came back downstairs.”

“Something happened in that bathroom.” Priya’s voice, lower. “I don’t know what she said but Lyra has barely spoken since.”

“Whatever it was, it worked. Lyra’s been leaving her alone all afternoon.”

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10:37 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 13

A pause.

“Do you think it’s true?”

I stopped walking.

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