Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 58

Chapter 58

DENISE

I was looking at scarves when I felt her.

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Not saw-felt, the specific prickling awareness that four years of conditioning had built into me, the particular frequency that my nervous system had learned to register before my brain caught up. Thad been hoping that response would fade now that I was out of her direct orbit. Apparently it needed more time.

I turned around.

Lyra was crossing the store floor toward me.

She looked different from the last time I’d seen her-the Grand Aldric, the corridor, the security personnel. That Lyra had been furious but put-together, her hair and clothes and bearing still performing the version of herself she showed to rooms that mattered. This Lyra was something else. Her hair was not in its usual immaculate arrangement-not dramatically disheveled, but with the particular looseness of someone who had not given it the usual attention. Her clothes were right but her posture was carrying something, a tightness around the shoulders and jaw that I recognized as a person who had not been sleeping well or eating regularly or generally existing in a state of equilibrium.

She looked rattled.

I set down the scarf I’d been holding and waited.

She stopped in front of me with the energy of someone who had been building toward a confrontation and had arrived at it before fully deciding what shape they wanted it to take.

“You think you’ve won something,” she said.

Her voice was lower than usual, compressed, the way voices got when the feeling behind them was too large for the volume to contain comfortably.

“I’m shopping,” I said. “I’m not thinking about you at all.”

“That’s going to change.” She stepped slightly closer. “Whatever you think you’ve built with Kieran Nightshade-whatever this arrangement is, whatever he’s told you-you are going to regret it. This little power trip of yours has a ceiling and you’re going to hit it soon, and when you do-”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said.

She stopped.

“Genuinely,” I continued. “Whatever’s coming. Because so far, every ceiling people have told me I was about to hit has turned out to be a floor I walked through, and the view from the other side keeps getting better.” I looked at her with the same level attention I’d been giving her for years, the attention that didn’t flinch and didn’t perform. “And as long as clearing your ceilings keeps putting me somewhere you can’t reach, I’m going to keep doing it.”

Her expression moved through several things.

Her hand came up.

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1:26 pm P P P P

Chapter 58

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+caught her wrist before it arrived-same as the bathroom, same as the corridor, clean and certain-and held it without squeezing, just enough to be a fact

“You don’t have Priya and Cass with you,” I said. “And Cyrus is otherwise occupied with his legal situation. You can’t fight, Lyra. You never could. You’ve always needed the numbers.” I released her wrist and stepped back. “Don’t do that again.”

She pulled her arm back and looked at me with the specific fury of someone who has been accurately described.

Then she reached into her bag.

“You want to talk about what you’ve built?” she said. Her voice had found a different register now quieter, with the controlled quality of someone who had decided to switch weapons. She held out her phone.

I looked at the screen.

The photograph. The same one I’d seen the morning after Kieran returned from Tokyo-the grainy street image, the obscured woman, the tabloid framing that had been pulled down within hours of appearing. Someone had screenshotted it before the removal.

“Alyssa Stone,” Lyra said.

The name sat in the air between us.

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