Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 46

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

DENISE

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Between the third and fourth shops, we stopped for tea at a place Rosaline knew, a small, warm room with good pastries and no ambient music. We sat across from each other and she poured tea with the efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times and I ate a pastry because my ribs still appreciated not being hungry.

“He watches the footage,” she said, without preamble.

I looked up.

“The police station footage.” She held her cup in both hands. “I know because I do too, occasionally. But he watches it more.” She looked at me steadily. “I’m not telling you this to pressure you or to interpret it for you. I’m telling you because I think you’re someone who prefers to have the full information.”

I was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know what to do with that.”

“You don’t need to do anything with it,” she said. “Just keep it.” She set her cup down. “He’s not a man who shows things easily. He never has been, even as a child. But the things he shows are real. That’s the exchange.”

I looked at my tea.

“His father,” I said, because I wanted to move to something I could be more useful in. “The medication he’s on-I noticed the particular color at the Grand Aldric. And the way he was managing his posture. Is it cardiac?”

Rosaline looked at me with an expression that shifted from social to something more direct. “Yes. How did you know?”

“My house mother at St. Mira’s had a similar presentation for three years before her diagnosis. I learned to recognize it.” I paused. “There are some things that help alongside the standard treatment. Not alternatives-additions. If his doctor hasn’t mentioned magnesium threonate and the specific compression approach for the edema in his left ankle, it might be worth asking.”

Rosaline was very still.

“The ankle,” she said. “He thinks nobody notices.”

“He redistributes his weight to the right side when he stands for more than ten minutes,” I said. “It’s subtle. I noticed at the Grand Aldric.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she reached across the table and put her hand briefly over mine–the same gesture from the first meeting, the one that communicated something without requiring words.

“I’m going to like you very much,” she said. “I already do, but I’m going to like you more.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I finished my pastry.

The fourth shop was on a quieter street, narrower frontage than the others, with a discreet sign and the kind of entrance that didn’t

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Chapter 46

-announce itself. Inside, it opened up-high ceilings, good light, dresses spaced widely enough to breathe.

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We were twenty minutes in, and was standing in something that had the right structural quality but the wrong neckline, when the door opened.

I heard them before the consultant turned.

Eleria’s voice first-warm, familiar, carrying the particular tone of someone in the middle of a pleasant conversation. And then a second voice, female, slightly lower, with the easy familiarity of someone who had known Elena for years.

The consultant at the door said something welcoming.

I stayed where I was in front of the mirror and watched the reflection.

Elena came into the main floor of the shop with a woman beside her-dark-haired, well-dressed, with the comfortable posture of a close friend. Elena was in the middle of a sentence when she saw me in the mirror.

The sentence stopped.

For a moment, we were both completely still-me in the mirror, her in the reflection, the moment held in the strange suspended quality of an encounter that neither of us had engineered.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

Then her eyes moved to Rosaline Nightshade, sitting in the velvet chair to my left with her tea, who looked back at Elena with the polite, comprehensive attention of a woman who never needed to perform anything.

Something moved across Elena’s face that I couldn’t fully read-the complex rapid calculation of a woman processing several pieces of information arriving simultaneously. Me, here. Rosaline, here. Both of us, here, in a bridal shop, in this configuration.

Her companion touched her arm and said something quiet.

Elena came back to herself with the graceful recovery of someone who had been trained since childhood to manage public composure. She smiled–and the smile was real, or the near-real version of real that she always managed, because Elena was not a person who did things falsely, which had always been the thing that made hating her cleanly impossible.

“Denise,” she said.

“Elena,” I said.

The shop held both of us in it with all the things that were not being said, and the consultant looked between us with the expression of someone identifying a situation that required careful navigation, and Rosaline sipped her tea with the composure of a woman who had seen everything and was in no hurry.

Elena looked at the dress I was standing in.

Then at Rosaline.

Then back at me.

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