Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

DENISE

:

I had a plan when I walked back into Blackwood Enterprises that afternoon.

AG 45

+5 Free Coins

It was a good plan. Clean, targeted, designed to create exactly the kind of noise that couldn’t be contained by a single phone call to HR-the kind that would travel upward through the company’s structure and reach the board before Dante had time to manage it. I’d worked out the details on the cab ride over, running through the sequence with the focused attention I brought to logistics when I’d committed to an outcome.

I was going to walk into the quarterly review meeting that was scheduled for three o’clock-the one I’d been coordinating for two weeks and therefore knew the exact attendee list for, including the three board members who would be present-and I was going to say, very clearly and without drama, that I was resigning, that my previous resignation had been cancelled without my consent by the Alpha I reported to, and that I considered this a violation of my employment rights and intended to pursue it accordingly. I wasn’t going to mention anything personal. I didn’t need to. The mere fact of a resigned employee being reinstated against their will, stated plainly in front of board members, was enough to create a paper trail that Dante couldn’t quietly erase.

That was the plan.

The plan lasted until I got to the fourth floor.

I heard them before I saw them-which was how it had always been with Lyra, even at the academy. Some frequency she operated on that my body registered before my brain caught up, a pre-emptive tightening that I’d spent years trying to train out of myself and had never fully succeeded.

The corridor near the east stairwell was quieter than the main office floor, a back route I used when I wanted to reach the archive room without walking through the open plan. I’d come this way deliberately, thinking it was the less trafficked option.

Lyra was there with three others.

I registered them in sequence: Lyra, centered, with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting rather than passing through. Priya on her left. Cass on her right. And one more- slightly behind, broader, familiar in a way that took me a half second to place before it landed.

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10:39 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 25

Cyrus Silvermoon.

Elena’s brother.

:

45

+5 Free Coins

He was taller than I remembered from the academy, filled out in the way men filled out in their twenties, with the square jaw and easy arrogance of someone who had grown up being told he was significant. The last time I’d seen him with any proximity had been six years ago, when he’d asked me to attend a social function with him in our third year at the academy, and I had declined, and he had looked at me with the specific fury of someone who had never before encountered the word no from a direction he hadn’t expected.

He had made the remainder of that year uncomfortable in the small, deniable ways that people with social capital made things uncomfortable for people without it-a word in the right ear, a laugh at the wrong moment, the withdrawal of the ambient social tolerance that passed for acceptance in those environments.

I had not forgotten.

He clearly hadn’t either.

“Denise.” Lyra’s voice was the pleasant one, which was the more dangerous register. “We were hoping to run into you.”

I stopped eight feet from them and took a quiet breath. Behind me, the main office floor was fifteen seconds of corridor away. In front of me, the east stairwell door was propped open, and through it I could see the landing-the stairs descending to the third floor below.

I looked at the stairwell door. I looked at Lyra.

I understood the geometry immediately.

“Whatever you’re planning,” I said, keeping my voice level, “think about what I told you yesterday.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.” Lyra tilted her head. “Specifically, I’ve been thinking about whether you were telling the truth. And I’ve decided you weren’t.” She glanced at Cyrus, then back at me. “You’re not pregnant. You’re too smart to actually get pregnant, and too calculating to let it happen by accident. You were buying time.”

She wasn’t wrong. But she wasn’t going to know that from my face.

“You have no way of knowing that,” I said.

“I have a way of making it irrelevant,” she said simply. “Accidents happen in buildings all the time. Especially to people who aren’t watching where they’re going near stairwells.”

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10:39 Wed, Sep 16

Chapter 25

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