Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

DENISE

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“Think about it logically,” I said, and I kept my voice academic, the tone of someone walking through a problem. “Your version of events-the one your sister told-is that I’m an unstable employee who became fixated on you and attacked members of your fiancée’s family in a fit of deranged jealousy.” I paused. “If that’s the story, then what you have here is an assault committed by a disturbed subordinate against your future brother-in-law. Which means you are, according to that story, a victim.”

He said nothing.

“Victims don’t intervene on behalf of their attackers,” I said. “Victims don’t arrive at police stations at “I glanced at the wall clock “-ten forty-five at night to appeal on behalf of the person who made a scene in their building and injured their future family.” I tilted my head slightly. “So why are you acting like a knight, Dante, when nobody asked for one? When, according to your own story, one isn’t needed?”

The room was very quiet.

Richard Silvermoon was looking between us with the expression of a man whose certainty had developed a hairline fracture.

Elena was looking at Dante.

Dante was looking at me, and the expression on his face was the one I almost never saw-the one that appeared when something had outmaneuvered him in a direction he hadn’t tracked. The calculation was still running but the result it was arriving at kept changing and he couldn’t find the stable answer.

“You’re confused,” he said finally. “You’re concussed and you’ve been through-”

“I’m very clear,” I said. “I have been very clear all evening.” I held his gaze. “If I hurt your future brother-in-law and I am, as everyone in this room is apparently in agreement, simply a troubled employee with no personal connection to you beyond professional obligation-then the correct response is to let the process proceed. To let the full severity of the law apply to someone who committed assault on a member of your fiancée’s family.” I paused. “So stop appealing, Dante. You’re creating confusion you don’t want created.”

The silence that followed was the longest of the evening.

Lyra, near the door, was no longer suppressing her expression. She was looking at me with something that was not the smug satisfaction from the hospital corridor-something more complicated, more alert.

Elena was still looking at Dante.

Richard Silvermoon had gone very still in the way of powerful men when they sensed that the room had shifted without their permission.

Dante looked at me across the table in the police station interview room and I looked back at him, and everything that was between us-four years of it, the hotel receipts and the pills and the credit cards and the car and the canceled resignation and the marble foyer and the dinner he’d sent me a photograph of-existed in the space between our eyes and was acknowledged by neither of us and understood by both.

He looked away first.

1/3

Chapter 31

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+turned to the officer who had been standing near the wall through all of this, holding a clipboard, doing the thing that police officers in interview rooms did which was to become as structurally neutral as possible until they were needed.

“Could you take me to the cell now, please?” I said.

The officer looked at his clipboard and then at the assembled group and then at me with the expression of someone who had seen many things in this building and was choosing not to rate this one. “Yes, ma’am.”

I stood up from the chair slowly, because my ribs and the concussion required slowness, and I gathered the small remaining dignity of my posture and held it.

I did not look at Dante again.

I did not look at Lyra, or Elena, or Richard Silvermoon.

I looked at the door and I walked toward it and the officer held it open, and I stepped through.

The corridor outside was the plain, institutional corridor of a police station at night-grey walls, linoleum floor, the sound of the building doing its quiet administrative work. Normal, ordinary, entirely uninterested in the fact that I was walking through it.

I kept walking.

One call. I needed one call and I needed it tonight. Kieran’s legal team-the number was in my phone and my phone was in a plastic bag on a desk and I was going to have to ask for it back and then make the call from wherever they put me.

I ran through what I knew, what I had, what was documented and where it was stored. The copies. The dates. The organization of it, the clean and deliberate structure of four years of careful record-keeping by a woman who had grown up with nothing and therefore understood that everything needed to be protected.

They had fired me.

That part, at least, had worked.

Not the way I’d planned-not the boardroom version, not the standing-upright-and-in-control version. But the outcome was the same. Blackwood Enterprises was behind me, one way or another.

The cell they put me in was small and cold and exactly what it was. I sat on the edge of the narrow bed and looked at the wall and breathed through the pain in my ribs and thought about the number i was going to ask to call in the morning.

Somewhere in this building, Dante Blackwood was deciding what the clean version of tonight’s story looked like.

He was very good at clean versions of stories.

So was 1.

1 had four years of his version and mine, and mine had timestamps.

I closed my eyes.

I counted.

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