Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 30

Chapter 30

DENISE

I had the number for his firm in my phone.

My phone, which was currently in a plastic bag on a desk somewhere outside this room.

I was still working through the logistics of this when the door opened and I understood, immediately, that the call was going to

wait.

They came in the order that made the most sense for who they each were.

Richard Silvermoon first, because he was the one with the immediate grievance and the social standing to demand priority. He was a large man in his sixties, silver-haired in the way that Alpha men of his generation often were-distinguished by default, authority worn like a second skin. Behind him, Elena, with the careful posture of someone trying to be present without being the cause of further escalation. Then Dante, hands in his jacket pockets, expression managed to neutral. And Lyra, who had no official standing in this room but had come anyway because she was Lyra and she would not miss this.

They arranged themselves in the room with the instinctive hierarchy of people who were accustomed to rooms arranging themselves around them.

I did not stand.

Richard Silvermoon looked at me in the chair and his expression carried the specific contempt of a man who had already written the verdict and was attending the proceedings as a formality.

“Do you understand,” he said, with the measured enunciation of contained fury, “what you have done?”

I looked at him.

“My son is in a hospital bed with a fractured skull.” His voice rose slightly on the last two words and then was brought back down with visible effort. “My son, who is the heir of the Silver Creek Pack, who has done nothing to you-”

“He put his hands on me first,” I said.

The room went slightly colder.

“Excuse me?”

“Your son put his hands on me first,” I repeated, at the same volume, with the same inflection. Not aggressive. Not defensive. The plain declarative tone of someone stating something that was true and didn’t require decoration. “He crossed a corridor with the stated intention of pushing me down a stairwell. I responded accordingly.”

“That is a lie.”

“It’s what happened.”

“You attacked a group of people in a building where you were employed, you caused serious injury to my son, and now you sit there-” He stopped, collecting himself. “You will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You will not see daylight for a considerable time. I will make certain of that personally.”

1/3

He said it the way powerful men said things when they had the resources to make them true, and I looked at him and felt nothing except the particular quality of attention you gave to something you were assessing rather than experiencing.

He was waiting for something from me. I could see it-the slight forward lean, the held breath, the readiness to receive a specific response. Fear, or apology, or the collapse of composure that would confirm the story Lyra had given them.

I gave him none of those things./

I looked at him and I waited.

Elena moved slightly beside her father. “Denise.” Her voice was softer than his, genuinely so, the tone of someone who believed they were offering something. “I know things have been-I know this has been difficult. If you were to apologize-if you could explain that this wasn’t what it looks like, that you understand what you did was wrong-my father would consider-it doesn’t have to go as far as it might. There’s still a way to make this-”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about your father’s anger,” I said.

The silence that followed had a specific texture.

Eleną blinked. Richard Silvermoon’s face underwent a rapid transition that moved through several distinct stages before settling on something dangerous. Lyra, near the door, pressed her lips together in the way people did when they were suppressing an expression they didn’t want seen.

“I beg your-” Richard started.

“His anger is not my problem to manage,” I said. Still the same tone. Not raised, not hostile-simply clear, in the way that facts were clear when you’d stopped caring about softening them. “His son’s actions in that corridor are a matter of record. There are security cameras in that building that your family’s anger doesn’t erase. There are eight stitches in my forearm and bruising on my ribs and an aggravated concussion that I arrived with because I was in a car accident last week and was discharged and-” I stopped there, because the next part was complicated and I wasn’t giving them/that.

“You should be very careful,” Richard Silvermoon said, “about what you say next.”

“I’ve been very careful for a long time,” I said. “I’m finished being careful.”

Dante moved.

He came around the table–not to Richard Silvermoon’s side, not to mine, but to the space between, the mediating position that was also the controlling position, which told me everything about what he was doing.

“Denise.” The voice was the managing one, quiet and certain. “Stop.”

I looked at him.

“I am working on this,” he said, with deliberate emphasis on working, as though the effort itself were something I should receive with gratitude. “There are people I can call tonight who will have this handled by morning. But you are making that significantly more difficult every time you speak.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify