Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 34

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

KIERAN

I had watched the footage four times.

Four complete viewings, and I was on the floor.

Not metaphorically. Literally on the floor of the backseat of my car, one hand braced against the door panel, the other pressed fla against my sternum like I was trying to keep something inside my chest from escaping, tears running down the sides of my face in the specific way that happened wheh laughter had been sustained past the point the body could manage it upright.

Jayce was in the seat above me, which was to say he was still in the seat because Jayce had more structural dignity than I did, but his shoulders were shaking and he’d had to remove his glasses because they kept fogging, and the sounds he was making were n sounds that would be described as professional by any reasonable observer.

Darius, my driver, had not said a single word in eleven minutes. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead with the concentration of a man performing open-heart surgery on himself in real time.

The footage was from a source I wasn’t going to name, obtained through channels I wasn’t going to document, of the interview room at the fourth precinct approximately forty minutes ago, Grainy, institutional, shot from the upper corner angle of a security camera. Audio slightly compressed. Completely, devastatingly clear.

I had watched Denise fold her hands on a police station table and take apart Dante Blackwood in front of his fiancée, his fiancée’s father, his sister, and two uniformed officers with the calm, measured efficiency of someone doing light administrative work.

*Did I ask you to?*

pressed my palm harder against my sternum.

‘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-then the correct response is to let the process proceed.*

Dante’s face in the footage. The precise moment the calculation in his eyes stopped producing a stable result. The way he’d looked away first.

“Stop,” Jayce said, above me. His voice was doing the controlled-shaking thing. “Kieran. You need to stop replaying it.”

“One more time.”

“You’ve said that three times.”

“I mean it this time.”

“You’re going to injure yourself.”

I got myself back into the seat through an act of physical will, wiped my face with my jacket sleeve, and looked at the phone screen.

“Why are you acting like a knight when nobody asked for one.”

I pressed play.

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Chapter 34

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Jayce put his face in his hands.

Darius, in the front seat, made a sound that was technically a cough and technically nothing else and was neither of those things.

¡ watched Dante’s face go through the specific sequence again-the certainty, the disruption of certainty, the scramble for a recovery that didn’t come-and felt the laughter rise again from somewhere foundational and unavoidable.

The thing was, it wasn’t just funny. It was funny in the specific way that things were funny when they were also true-when someone said the thing out loud that everyone in the room had been thinking and the saying of it made the shape of the thing visible in a way it hadn’t been before. Dante Blackwood had walked into a police station with his fiancée’s family to manage a situation that his own choices had created, and a woman with a concussion and eight stitches had identified the logical inconsistency of his presence in approximately forty seconds and then asked to be taken to her cell.

She had asked to be taken to her cell.

Rather than continue a conversation she was winning, she had ended it on her own terms and walked out.

I had been watching Dante Blackwood operate in this region for seven years. I had seen him in boardrooms and council chambers and diplomatic functions and the various arenas where Alpha men tested each other’s ceilings without ever making direct contact. He was good. He was genuinely, frustratingly good-precise and composed and always three moves ahead of the room’s current

conversation.

Denise had been two moves ahead of his three.

And she’d done it from a hospital bed and then a plastic chair, with bruised ribs.

I saved the footage to a secondary location, encrypted, because I intended to have it for the rest of my life.

Then I opened the group thread.

The thread had ten people in it, including me and Jayce, and had existed in various forms for eleven years-since the council leadership program that had put ten young Alphas and Alpha-adjacent figures in a room together for eighteen months and produced, among other things, the most reliably unhinged private messaging thread in pack political history.

I titled the clip: “Dante Blackwood getting reverse-psychologied into silence by a woman with a concussion at a police station. Sound on.*

I sent it.

The response was not immediate because it was nearly midnight and several of the ten were in different time zones or had, theoretically, been asleep.

Within four minutes, all ten were active.

**Reyes:** what am I watching

**Reyes:** WAIT

**Reyes:** WAIT WAIT WAIT

**Callum:** did she just

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Cattum:** she asked to go to the cell

**Callum:** she chose the cell over continuing to talk to him

**Callum:** the cell was preferable

**Maddox:** I’ve watched it twide. I need a moment

**Lena:** who IS she

**Lena:** Kieran who is this woman

**Lena:** “did I ask you to” I am going to get this tattooed

** Jayce:** I was in the car when he watched this the first time. He fell on the floor. Literally. On the floor of the car.

**Reyes:** THE FLOOR

**Callum:** deserved

**Maddox:** The moment where Blackwood looks away. I want that framed. I want it on my wall above my fireplace.

**Lena:** the fiancée is right there watching all of this

**Lena:** and he STILL couldn’t hold it together

**Lena:** what is happening with Blackwood

+10 Free Coins

**Noor:** Playing catch-up, just watched. Three observations. One: she’s been thinking about that argument for years. Two: Blackwood’s face at 1:47 is the face of a man realizing he’s been outmaneuvered by someone he underestimated for a very long time. Three: who arranged her release? That wasn’t the station doing that on their own.

I looked at that last message for a moment.

**Kieran:** Already handled..

**Noor:** Ah.

**Lena:** KIERAN

**Lena:** Kieran Emery Nightshade

**Reyes:** EMERY

**Callum:** we’re not doing the middle name thing right now.

**Reyes:** we are absolutely doing the middle name thing

**Lena:** so when you said you were handling the mate situation

**Lena:** you meant you had already found someone

**Lena:** and didn’t tell us

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:20 pm P P P P

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