Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

DENISE

The black car was parked directly across from my building entrance.

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Not a passing car. Not a neighbor’s. It was pulled in at the curb with the engine off, which meant it had been there long enough to be parked rather than waiting to move. The windows were dark but I knew that car the way I knew certain sounds-the precise pitch of a notification from a specific app, the particular creak of a floorboard I’d memorized from hearing it at two in the morning.

I stood on the pavement outside my building at eleven o’clock at night wearing Kieran Nightshade’s jacket and I had approximately four seconds before the car door opened.

It opened.

Dante unfolded from the driver’s seat with the particular controlled movement of a man who had been sitting still for a long time and was done being still. He was still in the clothes from dinner-the dark jacket, the open collar, the watch that caught the streetlight as he straightened up. His face was doing the thing it did when he was working very hard at appearing composed.

I had spent four years learning the difference between Dante composed and Dante managing

composure.

This was the second one.

“Where have you been?” he said.

His voice was level. The question was not.

I didn’t answer immediately. I finished the text to Kieran-*Inside. Goodnight*-sent it, and put my phone into my bag with the deliberate calm of someone who was deciding, in real time, exactly how much of themselves to spend on this moment.

“It’s eleven o’clock,” I said.

“I know what time it is.” He stepped away from the car toward me, and there was something in the way he moved that I catalogued quickly-not threatening exactly, but with an urgency that had been compressed into stillness and was now being released in movement. “I’ve been here since nine. I called you.”

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10:38 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 20

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watched him try to find a version of the sentence that didn’t say what it actually meant, which was: *it stopped being your own business when you belonged to me.*

I looked at his hand on my arm until he followed my gaze. He released me.

I stepped back. Put three feet of pavement between us and kept them.

“Were you followed?” he asked. The non-sequitur of it was disorienting for a moment before I understood what he was actually asking.

“That’s not the question you want to ask,” I said.

“Then answer the one I’m not asking.”

The streetlight was doing something to his face that made the exhaustion in it visible in a way it usually wasn’t. He had been sitting in that car for two hours. He’d had dinner with Elena, at the restaurant he’d never taken me to, and then he’d come here and waited, and I didn’t know what that meant and I wasn’t sure I was willing to spend energy finding out.

“Are you pregnant?”

The question arrived flat and direct, stripped of the preamble he might have used to soften it in a different mood.

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I laughed.

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