Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

DENISE

And then she nodded once at Cyrus, and Cyrus moved

He was fast for his size-Alpha bloodline, trained, the physical advantage of someone who’d grown up in a pack that treated combat ability as a social credential. He crossed the distance in two strides and his hands went to my shoulders with the intention of momentum, of redirecting my weight toward the open stairwell door.

I didn’t go backwards.

I went sideways.

Four years of being underestimated had given me one consistent advantage: nobody ever expected me to move toward something. They expected submission, recoil, the omega response. They braced for me to pull back.

I dropped my shoulder and turned into him instead of away, which broke his grip and put me inside his reach rather than at the end of it, and the shift in weight put him momentarily off-balance in a way he hadn’t prepared for.

I had four seconds and I used all of them.

I moved around him fast, back toward the archive room corridor, and my hand found the marble piece on the credenza with the certainty of someone who had already measured the distance without looking like they were measuring it. It was heavier than it appeared-both hands, solid weight, cold under my fingers.

Cyrus turned.

I swung it.

The sound it made connecting with the side of his head was not a sound I would forget. Not a sharp sound-a dense one, the kind that came with weight and impact, and Cyrus went down sideways against the wall with an expression of pure shock replacing the calculation that had been there a moment before. He hit the floor hard and did not immediately get up.

The corridor went very still.

Lyra stared at him. Then at me.

I was breathing harder than I wanted to be, both hands still on the marble piece, my arms shaking slightly from the weight and the adrenaline. I looked at Lyra across the corridor with whatever was on my face and I watched her reassess.

“That’s Elena’s brother,” Cass said, from somewhere to my left, like this was relevant information I might have missed.

“He put his hands on me first,” I said. My voice came out steadier than my arms felt. “In front of witnesses, in a building with security cameras on every floor.” I looked at Lyra, “Think carefully about what you do next.”

Lyra’s pleasant expression had gone. What replaced it was something rawer-the actual feeling underneath the performance, which was fury, and underneath the fury was something that looked, briefly, like the recognition that she had miscalculated.

She took a step toward me anyway.

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Chapter 26

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+moved to meet her, and whatever was in my face stopped her at a distance of three feet. I was close enough to see the precise

moment her certainty flickered.

“You want to do this here?” I said quietly. “In this building, on camera, with your brother on the floor? Go ahead.”

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“My arms are shaking because that thing is heavy.” I held her gaze. “The rest of me is fine.”

Priya touched Lyra’s arm. “Lyra. He’s not-Cyrus isn’t getting up.”

The dynamic in the corridor shifted as Priya crouched beside Cyrus, and the focused group geometry of four people with a shared objective became something less organized, the attention fracturing toward the person on the floor.

I used the moment.

I set the marble piece down on the credenza with a controlled movement-not dropping it, not slamming it, placing it-and straightened up. My hands were shaking badly now, the adrenaline burning off. My left shoulder ached where Cyrus had gripped it and there was a sting along my forearm that I hadn’t registered during it but was registering now, and my head was throbbing in the specific way that happened when my heart was working too hard.

Lyra was looking at Cyrus and then at me with an expression that had fully lost its social architecture-it was just anger now and the particular fear of someone watching a situation escape their control.

I opened my mouth to say something-I wasn’t sure what, some version of what I’d said in the bathroom, the measured and deliberate version-and then the lights shifted strangely.

Not the lights. My vision.

I put my hand out toward the wall, missed it, put it out again, and this time connected, and leaned on it because my legs were doing something unreliable.

It was the head, I understood distantly. The concussion from the accident had been declared mild but the doctor had said to avoid physical exertion and stress for two weeks, and I had attended a wedding planning session and an evening meeting and packed my apartment and sorted forty-three resale listings and now I had just conducted what amounted to a significant physical altercation with a man twice my weight and my body was submitting its grievances.

My knees went.

I got my back against the wall before I fully went down, which meant I slid rather than fell, which felt important though I wasn’t sure why. The corridor floor was cold through my trousers. The sting on my forearm was brighter now, and I could feel something damp there that I didn’t look at.

Lyra said something. I heard it but not the words.

Then there were voices from the other direction-the main corridor, the direction of the elevators, the direction of the office-and heard a door and the particular altered acoustics of a space that had suddenly more people in it.

I looked up.

Dante was there.

Dante, and behind him four men in the suits of people who had come from somewhere else, who were looking around the corridor with the expressions of people who had expected to be led through a building and had instead arrived in the aftermath of

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