Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 65

Chapter 65

DANTE

The photographs arrived at seven in the morning.

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My contact in Paris-a man I’d been using for three years for situations that required discretion and thoroughness in equal measure -sent them through the secure channel we’d established for exactly this kind of work. Eight photographs, varying quality, the best of them sharp enough to be useful and the worst of them still containing enough information to be worth looking at.

Kieran in Paris. Different locations across what appeared to be two days-a street near the seventh arrondissement, the entrance of a building that my contact had identified as a private residence in a good neighborhood, a restaurant exterior in the evening. In each photograph he was alone or with his driver, moving with the purposeful direction of a man who knew where he was going.

Not with anyone.

That was the first thing I noted. Every photograph-Kieran, unaccompanied.

went through them again more slowly.

My contact had included notes. The building near the seventh-cross-referenced against property records, associated with a holding company that resolved, through three layers of ownership, to the Stone family. Old money, established, the kind of family whose assets were structured specifically to be difficult to trace quickly. My contact had been thorough because I paid him to be horough.

Alyssa Stone’s residence, presumably. Or connected to her, at minimum.

Kieran had been in the vicinity. Had not, in any of the photographs, been seen with her. Had not, in the two days of surveillance,

made visible contact.

There was also a separate note. A company-a mid-sized tech firm with operations across three European countries-had experienced what my contact described as a targeted and rapid series of financial complications over the past seventy-two hours. nvestor withdrawals, a credit facility pulled, two board members resigning in the same forty-eight hour window. The speed and coordination of it had the particular signature of something that had been organized rather than occurred naturally.

The company’s CEO had a name I didn’t recognize.

What my contact had attached below the name was a record-a harassment complaint filed eight months ago, handled internally, never resolved publicly. The complainant’s name had been redacted in the document my contact had obtained, but the timing and the company’s location in Paris and the current state of that company’s finances told a coherent story.

Kieran had gone to Paris because someone had done something to someone he cared about.

And he was dealing with it in the specific, organized, financially devastating way that a man with his resources dealt with things when he wanted them dealt with permanently rather than temporarily.

But he hadn’t seen her.

I sat with that.

There were reasons a man went to a city to protect someone and didn’t make contact with that person. Protective distance-not

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Chapter 65

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wanting the association visible. Or a relationship that had boundaries around it, rules that both parties had agreed to. Or something more complicated, the kind of situation that required physical proximity to manage without the managing requiring

presence.

¡ looked at the photographs again.

I thought about sending them to Denise.

The thought was present and I examined it honestly: I wanted her to see them. Not because I believed they would hurt her-or not only that. Because I wanted her to have the information, wanted her to look at Kieran in Paris with a woman she’d never met and understand that what she’d walked into was more complicated than a clean arrangement with documented terms.

I wanted her to have doubts.

I wanted her doubts to bring her back to a conversation she’d been ending everytime I tried to start it.

I looked at the photographs for another moment and then closed the file.

Not yet.

If I sent this now, she would think I’d manufactured it. She would look at the photographs and at the accompanying information and she would hear Dante Blackwood trying to pull her back by undermining the alternative, which was exactly what it was, and she was too clear-eyed to receive it as anything else.

I needed to wait. I needed her to start asking questions on her own, to start looking at Kieran’s absence and his limited communication and the unresolved conversation she’d said she was ready to have. When she was already looking, I could show up with the answers. The information would land differently when she was already reaching for it.

I filed the photographs and the notes in the secure folder and opened my calendar.

The morning was meetings.

A planning session with the Enterprises legal team about the counter-filing-Marcus Webb had confirmed that Cyrus’s team was moving toward a formal withdrawal of the assault charge, which was the outcome I’d expected and had nothing to celebrate about because the conditions that had produced the charge were still present and unresolved. A call with the Tokyo investor about the follow-up arrangements from last week. A conversation with my father about the Kellerman situation, which had not improved and would not improve until the Grand Aldric incident had more distance from it.

My father, on the call, said Lyra’s name once and said it with the particular careful neutrality of a man who had decided that neutrality was the only position he could hold without either defending the indefensible or condemning his own daughter.

I said I was handling it.

He said he trusted me.

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that trust was a different thing from confidence and I wasn’t sure he had the second

one.

By eleven I had moved through the morning’s obligations and was looking at the afternoon’s when my assistant knocked.

“Alpha Blackwood.” Her voice had the careful quality it used for unexpected arrivals. “Elena is here,”

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