Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 51

Chapter 51

Chapter 51

DENISE

Mrs. Adeyemi had made tea.

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This was what she did when something mattered-not coffee, but proper tea from the smalt caddy she kept on the shelf above her desk, the one that only came down for significant occasions.

I had watched her make it at seventeen when I got my first scholarship offer, and at nineteen when I told her I had a job, and today when I arrived with the first installment of the heating fund transfer documentation and set it on her desk.

She had looked at the papers for a long moment.

Then she had gone to the shelf.

We sat across from each other with our cups and she asked me carefully, in the way she asked things she didn’t want to push on, how i was. I told her honestly. She listened without interrupting, knowing that this was someone who wanted her to be a listener more than anything else.

“The children have been asking about you,” she said.

‘I’ll come on Sunday,” I said. “Properly. Not just to drop things off.”

She nodded, satisfied, and we finished our tea.

I was on the front steps pulling on my coat when I saw the car.

it was parked across the street with the engine off, which meant it had been there long enough to park rather than passing through. I knew who had the car, before someone told me. I stood on the top step.

He got out.

He didn’t cross the street immediately-just stood beside the car and was waiting to see what I did with it. Not aggressive.

Behind me, I heard the soft sound of Mrs. Adeyemi’s office window-old wood, it never closed silently-and I understood that she was watching, which meant the street outside her orphanage was not the place for whatever this was going to be.

I went down the steps.

I crossed the street.

I got in the car.

He didn’t speak immediately, which was a technique I recognized. Dante used silence the way other people used words-letting the silence do the job, rather than letting the words.

I looked out the windscreen as he pulled away from the curb and said nothing, because I was also capable of silence and I had decided before I’d finished crossing the street that I was not going to spend any of my energy on things he hadn’t asked yet.

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Chapter 51

We drove for two minutes.

Then he reached over and placed something on the seat between us.

A photograph.

I looked at it without picking it up.

The hotel entrance-one I recognized from a specific period, the particular green canopy and the stone steps. Evening light. Two figures leaving through the main doors.

Me and Dante, eighteen months ago.

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I looked at it for a moment. Then I looked out the windscreen again.

“I know about Kieran,” he said.

“What about him,” I said.

“The arrangement. Whatever he’s told you it is.” A pause. “The legal filing. The Grand Aldric. My mother’s-” He stopped briefly. “I know the shape of it.”

“Then you don’t need me to explain it.”

“I need you to understand that I will not allow it.”

I turned to look at him.

He was watching the road, both hands on the wheel, jaw set in the way it was set when he had decided something and was delivering the decision rather than discussing it. The photograph sat on the seat between us, an eighteen-month-old image of something he apparently believed was still leverage.

I looked at the photograph again.

“You wanted to see if I’d deny it,” I continued. “You put it on the seat instead of saying anything because you wanted to watch my face when I saw it. You wanted to know if it would make me-” I stopped. “What did you think it would do? Make me apologize? Come back?”

Dante said nothing.

The silence was not the managed kind. It was the other kind-the kind that appeared when there was no version of the truth that served the purpose well enough to be worth saying.

The car slowed at a red light.

I picked up the photograph and put it in my bag-not for him, not as any kind of concession, but because it was an image of me and I was not leaving it on a seat.

Then I opened the car door.

“Denise–”

I got out.

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Chapter 51

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The air was cold and immediate and real, the city going about its afternoon on all sides with the complete indifference of a world that had not been holding its breath for this moment. I closed the car door behind me with a clean, quiet click and stepped up onto the pavement.

Behind me, the light changed.

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