Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

DANTE

Lyra’s jaw moved. “She needed to understand that-

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“What exactly were you doing in that bathroom, Lyra?” I turned to look at her directly. “Before you give me whatever version you’ve prepared, think about the security footage. Think about the camera on the fourth-floor east corridor. Think about the timestamp on when Cyrus arrived on that floor and the timestamp on when Denise arrived and what the geometric relationship between those two timestamps says about who was where first.”

The silence in the car was very specific.

Lyra looked at me with the expression she’d worn since childhood when she’d been caught-not guilt, exactly, Lyra’s relationship with guilt was complicated, but the recalibration of someone reassessing which version of a story was still viable.

“She attacked Cyrus,” she said. “Whatever happened before, the attack is documented.”

“With an object she picked up after he put his hands on her,” I said. “In a corridor where she was outnumbered four to one.” I turned back to the windscreen. “Tell me what the security footage shows, Lyra. Walk me through it. What does it show if someone other than Richard Silvermoon looks at it?”

The silence stretched.

“He had a right to be angry,” Lyra said finally. “She humiliated him. At the academy-”

“That was six years ago.”

“He hasn’t forgotten.”

“Evidently.” I started the engine. “The pregnancy claim. Is it true or did she say it to get you off her.”

Another pause. “I don’t know,” Lyra said, and for once she sounded like she was telling the truth. “She said it like she mean it. But she also-” A breath. “She also said a lot of other things that I didn’t expect fer to say. She’s different.”

“I know,” I said.

I put the car in gear.

“Dante.” Lyra’s voice, quieter now, the version she used when she was trying to reach me rather than manage me. “Whatever she is to you-whatever she was-it’s done. Elena is your future. The mating ceremony is in eight weeks. Everything you’ve built, everything father built, the alliance with Silver Creek-all of it depends on this proceeding cleanly.” She paused. “Let her face the consequences. It’s cleaner.”

I drove out of the car park without responding.

I went back to the penthouse and stood at the window for a long time.

The city was the same as it always was at this hour-indifferent, luminous, organized by the logic of a hundred thousand separate

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tives

it usually did, which was to make individual problems feel smaller by context.

It wasn’t working tonight.

I thought about the interview room. Denise in the chair with her folded hands and her measured voice and the eight stitches in her forearm that she wasn’t favoring because she didn’ favor things, had never favored things, had been taking hits since she was sixteen and absorbing them into herself with a self-sufficiency that I had once found uncomplicated and now found-

I stopped.

I thought about the car accident. The way she’d called my name from the wreckage-not calmly, not the controlled version, the real one, stripped of the performance she usually maintained. “You promised you’d never leave me. And I had walked away because Elena was there and the flight was real and Denise was not, in the accounting of that moment, the variable I could afford to prioritize.

I thought about the pills.

That one arrived more slowly and hit differently. I had asked her to take them. She had told me they made her sick and I had told her to switch brands and she had switched brands and been sick in a different way, and I had filed this under *managed and moved on. I had not thought about it since. I was thinking about it now.

I thought about fifty thousand dollars wired to her account for a slap my sister had delivered in public, and Denise texting back *thank you, Alpha* within the hour, and the bag I’d assumed she bought for herself, and the life she’d built inside the constraints I’c created for her, and the fact that she’d had a separate bank account in a name I didn’t know at a credit union I’d never heard of, which I had discovered from her account activity six months ago and chosen not to ask about.

I had chosen not to ask about it because asking would have required acknowledging that she had a self that existed outside of what I provided. And acknowledging that would have made the arrangement more complicated than I’d wanted it to be.

I poured a glass of water because I didn’t want whiskey. I drank it looking at the city.

She was in a cell tonight.

The thought arrived and wouldn’t leave. Denise in a police cell with aggravated concussion and stitches and bruised ribs because my sister had cornered her with three people including a man who had held a six-year grudge, and when she’d defended herself the way any reasonable person would, the resources of two Alpha families had landed on her before she’d been given access to so much as a phone call.

She had looked at me across that table and asked me why I was acting like a knight when nobody asked for one, and the answer! hadn’t given her, the honest one, was that I didn’t know. That I had been operating on instinct from the moment I’d walked into that corridor and seen her on the floor, and my instincts were telling me something I had been refusing to hear for considerably longer than tonight.

My phone showed a message from Elena: “Home safely. We should talk this week.”

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I scrolled to a number I hadn’t called in several years-Marcus Webb, the best criminal defense attorney I knew personally, with a reputation for walking into impossible situations and finding the door.

it was nearly midnight. He would be asleep,

I called anyway.

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Chapter 33

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He answered on the third ring with the voice of a man who had learned to wake up clean and functional regardless of the hour.

“Blackwood,” he said. “This is either very interesting or very expensive.”

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