Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 35

Chapter 35

KIERAN

I looked at that one for a longer moment.

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Noor was the strategist of the group in the specific way that people who spoke rarely and thought always were strategists. She didn’t contribute to the comedic current of most of our threads, but when she did contribute, it was the thing worth reading.

**Kieran:** He already suspects. He was watching the bar at Seren LAST NIGHT.

The thread went quiet for a moment.

**Maddox:** He was at Seren.

**Kieran:** With Elena. Different section.

**Catlum:** and he saw you.

**Kieran:** He saw someone at the bar. He didn’t have a clear line of sight.

**Noor:** But he’ll calculate it. He has the resources and he’s not slow. Once he knows she had a lawyer at the precinct within the hour, he’ll start working backward.

**Maddox:** Does it matter if he knows?

**Noor:** It matters for timing. If he figures out the direction before the formal announcement, he’ll try to move first. Create a counter-narrative. He’s good at those.

**Lena:** what kind of counter-narrative can you build when there’s footage of you failing to answer a question from the person you were allegedly not in a relationship with

**Reyes:** the footage is from a police station security camera

**Reyes:** Kieran how do you have this

**Kieran:** I have friends.

**Reyes:** concerning

**Callum:** useful

**Jayce:** We’re pulling up to the station now.

The thread continued without me as I put the phone in my jacket pocket and looked out the window.

The fourth precinct was a grey building on a grey street, with the practical, unceremonious architecture of something built to function rather than to impress. Two officers on the front steps. A patrol car at the curb. The quiet of a city block at midnight that had seen enough that another car pulling up registered as nothing notable.

Marcus Webb had called me forty minutes ago-not knowing I was already aware of the situation, going through a channel that

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connected back to me through two intermediaries he didn’t know were mine, because Marcus Webb was Dante’s man and I had needed tonight’s specific outcome rather than Qante’s version of it.

Denise was being processed for release.

The charges weren’t dropped-that would take longer, required the security footage and a proper filing, required the things that Marcus Webb was apparently also now pursuing on Dante’s behalf, which was interesting. But she wouldn’t spend the night in the cell. The assault charge had enough contradictions in the preliminary evidence that holding her overnight was a liability the precinct captain, who understood political situations, had decided wasn’t worth the exposure.

I had ensured that he understood this.

Darius stopped the car.

I sat for a moment and looked at the precinct entrance and thought about the footage-not the funny part this time, or not only the funny part. The part where she’d asked to go to the cell rather than continue a conversation she was winning. The part where she’d looked at Dante with complete steadiness and dismantled the logic of his presence without raising her voice.

The part, before all of that, that I hadn’t found funny at all-the part where she was in a hospital bed with aggravated concussion and eight stitches, because a group of people had cornered her in a building corridor with the intention of causing her serious physical harm, and she’d come out of it the way she came out of everything, which was still standing.

thought about what she’d told me over dinner. The shape of what she wanted-the degree, the foundation, the name on something that was hers. The orphanage she’d mentioned with the specific care of someone protecting the thing that mattered most by mentioning it plainly, no preamble, no softening, just: “this is here, this is what I need, this is non-negotiable.*

And then the thing she’d said at the end, looking at me across the table with the grey London light behind my window and the coffee between us. *I’m going to find out who you’re in love with. Not as a threat. As an orientation. As a woman who understood that knowing the complete map of something was different from intending to exploit it, and wanted me to know she understood the difference.

had told her to ask me again in a month.

had meant it.

The precinct door opened.

She came out in the same clothes from the hospital-the blouse and trousers, slightly worse now for everything the evening had added to them. She was moving carefully, the way people moved when they were managing pain and not advertising it, her left arm held slightly close to her body. She had the small plastic bag of personal effects that precincts gave you on release, and she was looking at the steps with the focused attention of someone making sure they navigated them correctly.

She didn’t see the car immediately.

I got out,

She looked up at the sound of the door, and across the pavement I watched her face do something that she didn’t quite manage to contain before it settled back into the composure she maintained like infrastructure. Something that was not surprise exactly-she was past surprise, I thought, at least for tonight-but a kind of recognition that arrived with feeling attached.

She crossed toward me and stopped at a reasonable distance.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

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Chapter 35

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“Probably not,” I agreed.

“It creates a visible connection before we’re ready to make one.”

“It does.”

“Anyone could see this.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me for a moment.

“How long have you been waiting?” she asked.

“Long enough to watch something very entertaining on my phone,” I said. “Are you alright?”

She considered the question with the seriousness she gave to questions she intended to answer honestly. “I’ve been better. I’ve also been worse.” A pause. “The ribs are the worst of it. And the light.”

“The car is dark,” I said, and opened the door.

She looked at it, and then at me, and the thing she’d almost shown me on the precinct steps was still present somewhere just behind the composure.

‘I was going to handle this myself,” she said.

‘I know.”

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