Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

DENISE

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“She was going to say something to Dante about why she came today, Elena said, and her voice was trying to be steady and not quite getting there. “Lyra told me-she said you’d been-that this wasn’t the first time you’d-” She pressed her hand to her mouth briefly. “I thought we were becoming friends. I thought-after yesterday, I thought–”

“Elena.” Dante’s voice, from beside the window. Calm, certain, the voice of a man closing a door. “She was unhappy about the changes at the company. It got out of hand.”

I stared at him.

He looked at me.

And in that look-in the brief, steady, unrepentant return of my gaze-I understood exactly what was happening and exactly what he was asking for, and the asking was so vast and so brazen that for a moment it simply didn’t fit inside my comprehension.

He was going to let it stand.

He was going to let Lyra’s story stand, and he was going to fold Elena’s hurt into it and come out on the other side with his reputation intact and his engagement intact and his investment relationships intact, and the price of all of that was going to be paid by me, and he was looking at me right now with the expression of a man who had made the calculation and arrived at a number and was now presenting it as the only reasonable option.

“Denise.” His voice was gentle. The gentle voice. The one I had once believed meant he cared. “I need you to apologize to Elena.”

The silence that followed was the loudest I had ever heard.

“I never saw you that way,” he continued, and his voice didn’t waver, it was steady and clear and delivered with the convincing ease of a man who had been managing narratives his entire life. “Whatever you believed about what we were to each other-I was your employer. That was always the full extent of it. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.”

Elena made a small sound.

I looked at Dante Blackwood-at the face I had known for four years, at the mouth that had said “I won’t let anyone hurt you again* to a sixteen-year-old girl in a hospital room-and felt something inside me that had been weight become something else entirely.

Not grief. Past grief.

Not anger. Past anger.

Something that was, if I sat with it honestly, the specific sensation of a person watching the last wall of a burning building fall and understanding that the clearing of the site was the beginning of the rebuild.

And then I laughed.

It came up from somewhere deep and involuntary and entirely out of my control, the kind of laughter that had nothing to do with anything being funny, the kind that was the body’s last-resort response to something too enormous for tears or screaming. It shook my ribs and pulled at my stitches and I pressed my hand to my side and kept laughing, and it sounded, I was aware, like something close to hysterical, because it was.

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Chapter 28

Elena tooked frightened. Dante looked-for the first time in our entire history-uncertain.

“Denise.” His voice had a warning in it. “Stop.”

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i couldn’t stop. I pressed my fingers over my mouth and breathed through it and managed to get it down to something that only shook my shoulders.

I was going to tell him. I was going to say it-all of it, clearly, in front of Elena, the four years and the hotel receipts and the pills and the credit cards and the car-I was going to open the full account in this room and let the numbers speak.

The door opened.

A man I recognized came in first-broad, grey-haired, with the bearing of an Alpha who had been significant for long enough that significance had become indistinguishable from his natural state. Richard Silvermoon, patriarch of the Silver Creek Pack and Elena’s father, with the expression of a man who had been presented with a problem and had already decided on the solution.

Behind him, two uniformed officers.

I looked at the officers and at Richard Silvermoon and at Dante, who was standing by the window with his expression back under control now, composed, the public version.

“Mr. Silvermoon-” Dante began.

“My son is in a room down this corridor with a fractured skull,” Richard Silvermoon said, with the precise, clipped enunciation of contained fury. “This woman is responsible.”

“There are circumstances-”

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