Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 21

Chapter 21

DENISE

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45

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“Let me help you with the arithmetic,” I said. “You are mating Elena Silvermoon. You have been planning this since she finalized her divorce. You have a thirty-million-dollar handbag delivered to her and you post vacation photographs and everyone in the pack community knows that this is the great love story of your generation.” I held his gaze. “And you came here tonight and grabbed my arm in the street at eleven o’clock because some version of you has apparently decided that I belong to you in a way that I have never agreed to.”

“Denise-”

“Had you forgotten,” I said, “that you were the one who made me take the pills?”

The silence that followed was a specific kind. The kind that happened when something true had been said too directly for the room to absorb it immediately.

“Every month,” I continued, my voice steady and unhurried. “Because you didn’t like the alternative. Because it was more convenient. Because you asked and I did it because I was nineteen and I thought that doing what you asked was what love looked like.” I paused. “They made me sick. You knew they made me sick. I told you, and you said to switch brands, and I switched brands, and they made me sick in a slightly different way, and I kept taking them because you wanted me to.”

His expression had gone to something I didn’t have an easy name for. Not guilt-Dante didn’t do guilt cleanly, it always arrived complicated by other things. But something in the region of it. Something that looked, for a brief moment, like a man confronting an account he hadn’t balanced.

“So if you’re asking whether I’m pregnant,” I said, “the answer is no. Biochemically, it would be a significant achievement given four years of the pills you insisted on. And if by some extraordinary coincidence I were-” I let the pause sit for exactly a beat. “I would handle it myself. The way I’ve handled everything else myself. The way orphan omegas learn to handle things when there’s nobody coming.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said, and his voice had changed-lower, with an edge in it I recognized as fear dressed up in authority. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“I would do whatever I needed to do with my own body,” I said simply. “The same as I always have. The same as you’ve always expected me to.”

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10:38 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 21

He stared at me.

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“Go home, Dante,” I said again. “Go home to Elena. Take her out for breakfast tomorrow. Buy her something else. Post a photograph.” I pulled Kieran’s jacket a little closer around my shoulders, not for warmth, just because it was there. “You have a life arranged and waiting for you. Go live it.”

“Who was in that car?”

“Goodnight.”

“Denise.” There it was again-my name in his mouth, the specific two syllables that had once been enough to stop me mid-stride, to turn me around, to make me negotiate with my own better judgment. “Tell me who that was.”

I looked at him one last time.

He was standing on the pavement outside my building at eleven o’clock at night, his dinner jacket slightly rumpled from two hours in a car seat, his expression carrying the particular quality of a man who had gotten everything he wanted and was only now discovering that he also wanted something he hadn’t accounted for. It would have been easier to pity him if I hadn’t known what it cost. If I hadn’t been the currency he’d spent getting here.

“Someone who showed up on time,” I said.

I turned and walked into my building.

The door closed behind me and I stood in the entrance vestibule again, the same spot where I’d put on Kieran’s jacket ten minutes ago, and I listened to the quiet of the building around me-the distant sound of a television from somewhere upstairs, the hum of the elevator, the nothing sounds of an ordinary building at ordinary night.

Outside, after a long moment, I heard a car engine start.

I let out a breath.

My phone buzzed in my bag. I pulled it out expecting Dante, already prepared to decline it, but the name on the screen was different.

*Kieran: Safe travels back. Sleep well.*

I stood there in the vestibule of my building with his jacket around my shoulders and read the message twice.

Then I typed back: *I’m in. Thank you for tonight.*

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10:38 Wed, Sep 16

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