Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

KIERAN

The flight landed at six in the morning and I went directly to the council chamber.

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No stop at the penthouse, no breakfast beyond the coffee someone handed me in the anteroom before the session opened. Seven days in Tokyo had closed the trade deal and generated approximately four hours of sleep per night, and the council meeting had been scheduled before the trip was confirmed, which meant it wasn’t moving.

I sat down at the table and the session opened.

Two hours in, I understood that something had shifted while I was gone.

Councilors Vane and Ademi had, for the three years I’d been tracking them, maintained the specific neutrality of people who had decided that the Nightshade-Blackwood tension was not their problem to resolve and had arranged themselves accordingly.

Today Vane asked a question that aligned directly with a position I’d been arguing for two sessions. Just a question, shaped precisely, that could only have been possible by someone who had done their own conclusion on it.

Ademi seconded it.

I noted this without showing that I’d noted it and continued with the session.

Afterward, in the corridor, Vane stopped beside me briefly. “The Tokyo deal,” he said. “Well handled.” And moved on.

That was all. That was enough.

My father was waiting in the side room adjoining the council chamber.

This was not unusual when he attended sessions, which he did occasionally now-less than before his health had become something of a liability and we had to learn how to manage it in a way that it wouldn’t incapacitate him too much, until we were able to find out how to treat it completely which we still needed to find the mysterious Dr Hunt, who had been elusive for more than 5 five years.

He was standing at the window when I came in, which told me he’d been waiting a while and hadn’t wanted to sit.

I closed the door.

“The deal closed well,” he said, still looking at the window.

“It did.”

“Vane and Ademi.”

“I noticed.”

He turned from the window. He looked, as he had looked at the Grand Aldric, like a man doing the careful work of maintaining a posture that had become effortful. But his eyes were clear and focused in the way they always were–whatever his body was

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Chapter 50

managing, his mind remained exactly what it had always been.

He looked at me for a moment.

“I did some research,” he said.

I waited.

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“On the girl.” He said it without inflection. “Your mother has her opinions, which she has communicated to me at length.” A brief pause. “I preferred to form my own.”

“That’s your way,” I said.

“St. Mira’s orphanage,” he said. “In the east quarter. She grew up there from the age of four.” He looked at me steadily.

“When she was sixteen and had been at the pack academy for two years, she arranged for the orphanage’s winter heating bill to be covered through a series of small redirected bursary funds that technically belonged to her own academy account. She did this without telling anyone, without taking credit, and without the orphanage director knowing the source for three years.”

I said nothing.

“When she was eighteen,” he continued, “one of the younger children at St. Mira’s needed a medical procedure that the orphanage’s insurance didn’t cover. She worked three additional jobs over four months-documented, verifiable–and paid the deficit. The child’s file lists the payment as an anonymous donor.” He paused. “She was the donor.”

The side room was quiet.

“And when she was nineteen,” my father said, “she sat with the orphanage’s oldest resident-a woman in her eighties who had lived there for sixty years and had no family-every Sunday for two years until the woman died. She has not spoken of this to

anyone.”

He stopped.

I looked at him.

My father, who had said very little about Denise beyond the formal acknowledgment of the Grand Aldric introduction. Who had looked at her with the assessing directness of a man who trusted his own conclusions and didn’t arrive at them quickly. Who had spent a considerable amount of time running his own investigations in the background of a woman that was set to marry his son anytime soon.

“She is the right one,” he said.

He said it the way he said things that were finished-no qualification, no condition, just him concluding and also giving his approval on the go ahead.

The silence that followed was one of the more significant of my life,

My father looked at me with the eyes that had always seen more than he said.

“I know,” I said finally.

He nodded once.

He picked up his jacket from the chair and moved toward the door, and then stopped with his hand on the frame.

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Chapter 50

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“Don’t take too long,” he said. Not about the arrangement. About the other thing, the thing underneath it, the thing I hadn’t examined.

He left.

I stood in the side room for a moment longer than necessary.

Then I picked up my bag and went home.

The penthouse was quiet in the way it was quiet when it was empty rather than someone being around and decided to remain still, which was its own kind of quiet.

I registered this immediately and set my bag down and looked around the main foom. Everything in order. Nothing displaced. The guest room door open, the room itself neat.

Her coat was gone from the hook by the entrance.

I checked my phone. No message from her, which was not unusual-she didn’t report her movements and I hadn’t asked her to, because asking her to would have been doing the same managing that Dante had been doing to her for years and I promised not to be that kind of person.

I sent a text: *Back from the council meeting. Are you out?*

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