Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 66

Chapter 66

DANTE

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Elena came through the door and I knew immediately from the way she moved that this was not a casual visit. Not dramatic- Elena rarely did dramatic in the performative sense. But she had the quality of someone who had made a decision before they arrived and was here to deliver rather than discuss.

She sat in the chair across from my desk without the usual preliminary. She looked at me with the grey eyes that had always seen more than she showed, and I looked back at her, and for a moment neither of us said anything.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

“About whether to have this conversation.” She paused. “I’ve decided to have it.”

“Alright,” I said.

“I want to end the engagement.”

The words were delivered with the same even quality she brought to most things. Not cold-Elena was never cold-but resolved, the way things sounded when someone had moved past the stage of deciding and into the stage of saying.

I held my expression neutral.

“Tell me why,” I said.

“Because something has been wrong,” she said. “Since before the Grand Aldric. Since before Denise was fired from your company. Something has been-” She paused, finding the word. “Off. And I have been patient with off because I understand that you’ve been managing a complicated situation and I didn’t want to add to it.” She looked at me steadily. “But I’ve been thinking about it for two weeks and I keep arriving at the same question.”

I waited.

“Is there something between you and Denise that I should know about?”

The question landed with the precise clarity of something that had been aimed very carefully.

I looked at Elena across my desk-at the woman I had waited four years for, at the mating ceremony that was eight weeks away, at the alliance between our families, at the life I had been building toward since she’d finalized her divorce and called me and said she was ready.

I thought about the honest answer.

The honest answer was: yes. Four years. Everything I told you I was keeping for you, the fidelity and the devotion-the public version of that was real. The private version was more complicated.

I thought about what the honest answer cost.

Not just the ceremony and the alliance-though those were significant and real. But Elena herself, who had come here today with

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Chapter 66

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the particular courage of a woman asking a question she already suspected the answer to, because she was not a fool and had never been a fool and I had been in proximity to her long enough to know that her patience was not the same as not-knowing.

“We’re colleagues,” I said. “I knew her when she was in school-she was at the same academy as Lyra. When she came to Blackwood Enterprises as an intern, I wanted to make sure she was treated properly given the history with Lyra.” I paused, giving the explanation the weight of something that had been considered. “She’s efficient and capable and the situation with Lyra created complications that I’ve been managing badly. That’s the whole of it.”

Elena looked at me for a long moment.

The moment was the specific kind that existed when someone was deciding whether to accept what they’d been given.

“She called you by your name,” Elena said. “In the car. When the accident happened.”

“She was frightened,” I said. “It was an emergency.”

“You left her in the car,” Elena said. Not an accusation-a statement. The same way she’d said it in the hospital.

“The rescue team-

“I know.” She looked at her hands briefly. “I know what you’ve said about that.” She was quiet for a moment. “I just need to know if I’m making a decision about our future on accurate information.”

“You are,” I said.

The silence that followed was the kind that required something from me beyond words, and I stood and came around the desk and she stood too, and I held her with the particular careful certainty of a man who understood that this was a hinge-a moment that would hold or not hold based on what I did with it.

She was still for a moment.

Then she let herself be held, and the stiffness in her shoulders did something that was not quite releasing but was adjacent to it.

“I just want to know that what we’re building is real,” she said quietly.

“It’s real,” I said.

And the thing was-I meant it. Elena was real. What I had wanted with her for four years was real. The complication was not that Elena was wrong for me. The complication was that something else had also become real, alongside it, in the years I’d been waiting, and I had not managed the two real things honestly and they had both paid the price for it.

But that was a reckoning for a different time.

“The wedding,” I said, pulling back slightly to look at her. “When this has settled. When Lyra’s situation is resolved and the business is stabilized. I’m going to give you the biggest ceremony this pack has seen in a generation.” I held her gaze. “That’s a promise.”

She looked at me.

The grey eyes, still doing their careful, comprehensive work.

“All of it settled,” she said. “Before then.”

“All of it,” I said.

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Chapter 66

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