Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 3

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DENISE

I woke to a white ceiling and the steady beep of a machine somewhere beside my head. For a long moment I did not know where I was, or when, or why my throat felt like it had been scraped raw from the inside. Then the memory came back all at once, the smoke, the heat, Dante's back turned toward me, and I flinched so hard the machine beside me spiked in protest.

A nurse came in a few minutes later, checked my vitals, told me I was lucky. She said that the rescue team arrived and saved me just half a minute before the car exploded, and that smoke inhalation and a fractured leg were the worst of it. I nodded along to all of it, though the words felt distant, like they belonged to someone else's story.

My phone was on the side table, badly cracked but still working. I picked it up out of habit more than desire, and the first thing that loaded, because of course it did, was Elena's public page.

There were dozens of new posts. Photos from the villa, golden light and turquoise water, Elena in a white dress laughing on a balcony, Dante's arm around her waist, his head tipped toward hers like he was telling her a secret. One caption read something about new beginnings. Another, posted just hours after the accident, showed the two of them toasting glasses of champagne against a sunset, no mention anywhere of a burning car on the side of a highway, no mention of the woman they had left behind in it.

I scrolled through photo after photo, waiting to feel the familiar ache I had carried for years, the tightness in my chest that used to come whenever I saw Dante look at someone else the way he had once, briefly, looked at me.

It did not come.

I kept scrolling, almost testing myself, almost searching for the wound, and found only a strange, clean quiet where the pain used to live. I thought of Dante's face through the cracked windshield, calm, apologetic, already turning away. I thought of his voice explaining that Elena was scared of fire, as if that settled things, as if my own fear, my own suffocating panic, had simply not been worth factoring into his decision at all.

I set the phone down on my chest and stared at the ceiling, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that whatever I had loved in Dante Reyes had finally, completely burned away somewhere on the side of that highway. There was no ash left to mourn. There was only relief, quiet and enormous, spreading through me like the first easy breath after years of holding it in.