Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

DENISE

:

45

+5 Free Coins

I woke up the next morning with the particular clarity that came from having made a decision and slept on it without changing your mind.

The clarity lasted approximately four minutes, which was how long it took me to remember that I still had a job.

Not because I wanted one. Not because I’d chosen to. Because Dante Blackwood had walked into a human resources office and cancelled my resignation with the casual authority of a man who had never in his life encountered a door he couldn’t simply close again, and now I was expected to show up at Blackwood Enterprises this morning and perform competent subordinate while my soon-to-be-former Alpha planned his mating ceremony in the office above mine.

I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and breathed through it.

Then I sat up.

The thing about Dante was that he was meticulous. It was one of the qualities I’d admired early and learned to navigate later-his absolute intolerance for loose ends, for anything that reflected badly on the Blackwood name, for disorder in any form. He curated his image the way other people curated collections: carefully, deliberately, with an acute awareness of how things looked to outside observers.

Which meant there was exactly one thing he would not allow.

A scandal.

Not a quiet one. Not the kind that traveled in whispers through the pack community, passed between people who already suspected and were simply having their suspicions confirmed. Those he could manage. What he could not manage-what would genuinely cost him-was the kind of noise that reached the board of directors. The kind that required a formal response. The kind that became a document, a record, a thing that existed in the official architecture of the company rather than in the social atmosphere around it.

If I was going to leave Blackwood Enterprises in a way that couldn’t be reversed by a single phone call to HR, I needed to leave loudly enough that reversing it would cost him more than letting me go.

1/3

10:38 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 22

I thought about this while I made coffee.

:

The smile arrived before I’d fully finished the thought.

445

+5 Free Coins

I didn’t entirely recognize it on myself-it was a different shape from my usual ones, the careful bright ones and the deliberately empty ones and the small private ones I kept for moments no one else saw. This one was something more specific. Something that felt, if I was being honest, a little diabolical.

I decided I didn’t mind.

I spent the first part of the morning not at Blackwood Enterprises.

I opened every cupboard in my apartment and looked at what was in it with new eyes-the eyes of someone who was moving out, which was what I was doing, even if Kieran’s driver hadn’t been given the address yet and the timeline was still being formalized by a legal team I hadn’t met. The principle was settled. The rest was logistics.

The furniture was mine, or mostly mine-I’d furnished the apartment myself, nothing here was a gift from Dante except for three things I could identify immediately: a cashmere throw across the armchair that he’d brought one evening and left, a set of wine glasses that had arrived in a box one birthday, and a silk robe hanging behind the bathroom door that I’d found in a bag outside my apartment one morning with no note attached.

I put all three in a box and set it by the door.

Then I opened my wardrobe.

The clothes were another matter. Over four years, Dante’s money had bought me a wardrobe that was considerably nicer than anything I could have assembled on an intern’s salary progressing to a junior executive salary, and the pieces were good-genuinely good, the kind that resold well. I’d already demonstrated I knew how to move them, and the resale account was still active and had a transaction history now, which made it look like an established seller rather than a sudden one.

I pulled everything out and sorted with the focused efficiency I brought to everything when I’d made up my mind. Keep pile: things I’d bought with my own money, things I’d had before Dante, two dresses I’d purchased with paychecks from Blackwood Enterprises which were my own earned money and not a gift. Everything else went into the sell pile, sorted by condition and category, photographed against the white wall of the bedroom in the morning light.

By ten o’clock I had forty-three listings active on the resale account.

2/3

10:38 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 22

By ten-thirty I had seventeen inquiries and eight confirmed sales.

A3 45

+5 Free Coins

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify