Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 56

Chapter 56

DENISE

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I heard them before the door opened.

The corridor outside Kieran’s private office had the hushed, carpeted quality of a floor that took itself seriously-good wood paneling, indirect lighting, the ambient sound of a well-run operation doing its work at a respectful volume. It was the kind of corridor that communicated, without anyone saying anything, that the people who worked here were professionals who conducted themselves accordingly.

The sounds coming from behind Kieran’s office door were not consistent with this communication.

There was what I could only describe as scuffling. And then a voice-sharp, male, indignant-saying something that ended with *give it back.* And then something that was either a very aggressive whisper or a very restrained shout, and then a thud that had the quality of someone’s elbow connecting with a piece of furniture.

Kierah, beside me, closed his eyes briefly.

“They said they had a meeting,” he said, to no one in particular.

“In your office,” I said.

“Apparently.”

He opened the door.

The scene that presented itself was the following: five grown men, all of whom I would later learn held various significant positions. in pack society and business, arranged around Kieran’s office in postures that could generously be described as undignified. One of them-broad-shouldered, dark-haired, who I would come to know as Maddox-had his arm extended above his head with a phone held out of reach of a second man who was attempting to retrieve it with the focused determination of someone who had stopped caring how they looked. A third was laughing in the corner with his hand over his mouth. A fourth had apparently been pulled backward by his collar and was in the process of regaining his balance. And Jayce, who I recognized, was standing slightly apart from the main chaos with the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere expecting one thing and found another and had passed through embarrassment into a kind of exhausted resignation.

Nobody noticed us immediately.

The phone retrieval effort intensified. Maddox rotated to keep it out of reach. The man grabbing for it said something emphatic. The one in the corner laughed harder.

Then the one who had been pulled by his collar straightened up, turned around, and saw us.

His throat cleared.

It was a very loud, very deliberate clearing-the social equivalent of a fire alarm, designed to communicate stop everything immediately to everyone in the room without saying the words. The effect was immediate. Maddox lowered his arm. The phone grabber stepped back. The laughing stopped mid-laugh and converted itself into a cough. Jayce looked at the ceiling.

The transformation was, technically speaking, impressive.

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Chapter 56

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within approximately four seconds, five men who had been conducting themselves like unsupervised children at a birthday party had rearranged themselves into the posture of Reople who were serious and composed and had absolutely not just been wrestling over a phone. Jackets were straightened. Chins came up. Someone behind me opened a window, and then someone else turned on a fan, and the air in the room which had the particular thick quality of several Alphas, a gamma, and assorted others having been in an enclosed space in an elevated state for some time-began to move.

The pheromone situation was significant.

Alpha aggression had a specific smell that I recognized from years in pack environments-sharp, charged, the olfactory equivalent of a room where a storm had recently been. Mixed with the warmer undertones of gamma chemistry and the quieter notes of omega presence, the office smelled like a complicated argument that had gotten physical before anyone had fully committed to the physical part.

Kieran stepped fully into the room.

“Why,” he said, with the even tone of someone who had decided that volume was unnecessary when complete authority was already present, “are you in my office.”

A pause.

“We had a meeting,” said the one who had cleared his throat. He had warm brown skin and sharp eyes and was now doing an admirable job of presenting as someone who had been standing calmly in an office for the past twenty minutes.

“The meeting room is on the twenty-eighth floor,” Kieran said.

“Your office has better coffee,” said the one who had been laughing, who had now arranged himself in a chair with the ease of someone who was not embarrassed and had decided not to start being embarrassed now. He was lighter-haired than the others, with an expression that suggested he found most things genuinely amusing and didn’t particularly care who knew it.

“The coffee is the same,” Kieran said.

“It tastes better in here.”

Kieran looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man deciding whether this conversation was worth extending.

Then he turned slightly and looked at me.

“Denise,” he said, with the resignation of someone making introductions under conditions they had not planned for. “These are my friends. Callum-” the throat-clearer, “-Reyes-” the laugher, “-Maddox-” the phone-holder, still holding the phone, “-and Luca.” The one who had been pulled backward, now standing with recovered dignity. “You know Jayce.”

Jayce gave me the look of a man who wanted it acknowledged that he had not been the one wrestling.

I looked at all of them.

They looked at me.

There was a collective adjustment-the particular recalibration of a group of people who had been caught in a compromising situation and were now attempting to retroactively present as people who were not the kind of people who got caught in compromising situations. Shoulders went back. Expressions settled into something more carefully managed. Callum clasped his hands in front of him with the energy of someone at a formal presentation. Maddox put the phone in his pocket with a casualness that was doing a lot of work,

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