Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 67

Chapter 67

LYRA

Cyrus’s hotel room was nicer than I’d expected given that he’d been avoiding his father’s house for two weeks.

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The Aldenmere had the particular anonymous comfort of somewhere expensive enough to be pleasant and impersonal enough to feel like nowhere, which was exactly what both of us needed right now. Somewhere that wasn’t home, wasn’t monitored, wasn’t a room where someone’s expression told you what they thought of you before you’d said anything.

I’d been here three days.

My mother had called twice. I had let both go to voicemail and listened to them afterward with the phone at a distance, the way you handled things that were going to be unpleasant and you wanted to control the conditions of the unpleasantness.

Cyrus was sitting across from me with the careful posture of someone managing a head injury that was still making itself known. The stitches were out but the area had the particular sensitivity of recent healing, and he moved with a slight deliberateness that I noticed every time he turned his head too quickly.

We had been talking for an hour.

The talking had produced the specific frustration of two people who agreed on the objective and kept arriving at the same wall when they tried to work out the method.

“She has protection now,” I said. “Real protection. Not just Kieran’s name-his legal team, his family’s standing, the Nightshade network.” I looked at the window. “Anything that comes directly at her traces back. That’s the problem.”

“I know,” Cyrus said.

“I can’t go at his company. I have nothing on Kieran-no leverage, no insider access, his people are loyal in a way that ours aren’t.” I said the last part without inflection because it was simply true and being upset about it wasn’t useful. “And seducing him is-“I stopped. “There are rumors about a woman. Someone who was in his life before Denise, apparently still connected to him in some way. He’s not going to be redirected by me regardless.”

“So we don’t go at Kieran,” Cyrus said. “We’ve established that.”

“And we can’t go at her directly. Not visibly. Every time we’ve gone at her directly she’s turned it into something that makes us look

worse.”

“She’s good at that,” Cyrus said, with the neutral acknowledgment of someone who had decided that accuracy was more useful than pride.

“She’s been good at it since she was sixteen and I didn’t take it seriously enough.” I said this honestly because there was no point in not being honest in this room. The miscalculation was mine and pretending otherwise was the kind of thinking that produced more miscalculations. “She was always managing the situation. I thought she was surviving it. There’s a difference.”

Cyrus was quiet for a moment.

“My contact saw her,” he said. “A few days ago.”

“Where?”

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Chapter 67

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“East quarter. An orphanage called St. Mira’s.” He looked at me with the careful expression of someone delivering information they know is significant, “She goes regularly. Apparently she grew up there. She’s been sending money, visiting, involved with the operation.”

I sat with this.

The wall we kept hitting when we approached Denise directly was the Nightshade protection-the name, the legal infrastructure, the network that responded when she needed it responded. All of that was real and present when the attack was on her.

But there were things adjacent to her that didn’t have the same protection.

Things she cared about.

The specific vulnerability of someone who loved something was not the thing itself. It was the way their face changed when you mentioned it. The way their calculations shifted when it came into the equation. The way even the most composed person developed a tremor in their composure when something they genuinely loved was threatened.

Denise had been composed through everything we’d done directly to her.

I had never found the thing that made her composure fail.

I sat very still and thought about St. Mira’s. The orphanage in the east quarter. Children. A house mother. An operation that ran on limited resources and Denise’s quietly redirected funds.

I thought about what it would mean to Denise if something happened to St. Mira’s that she couldn’t prevent, that she felt responsible for.

The kind of thing that could happen to a place with old wiring and limited oversight and the general vulnerability of buildings that had been operating on tight budgets for decades.

The kind of thing that happened, sometimes, through no one’s/particular fault.

I started to reach for the shape of it-the how, the timing, the way to build distance between the plan and the planner-

My phone buzzed.

I looked at the screen.

My mother. Not a call this time-a text, which meant she had decided that calls were no longer sufficient.

*This is the third day. I have been patient. You will come home tonight. We have arranged the first meeting with Marco Marchetti for this week and you will be present and you will conduct yourself appropriately. This is not a discussion.*

I read it twice.

Then I read the second message below it.

“Your father has already agreed the terms with the Marchetti family. The only remaining variable is your presence. Do not make yourself the problem, Lyra. You have been the problem enough times recently.”

I set the phone face-down on the table.

Cyrus had seen my expression change. He waited without asking, which was one of the things I had always valued about him–he understood the difference between the moment to speak and the moment to be quiet.

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Chapter 67

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“My mother,” I said.

“The Marchetti situation?”

“They’ve already agreed terms.” looked at the wall. “My father agreed them without telling me.”

“Lyra-”

“I’m not going to Verona,” I said. “I’m not marrying someone I’ve met once at a pack function three years ago because it’s convenient for managing the mess that Denise created.” I picked up the phone and put it in my bag without responding to either message. “I’m not leaving this city.”

Cyrus looked at me with the expression of someone who had his own version of this conversation waiting at home and understood it from the inside.

“It might not be permanent,” he said carefully. “Verona, I mean. It might be temporary-distance until the situation settles.”

“The situation doesn’t settle,” I said. “That’s what I’ve understood about Denise. She doesn’t settle into a place that’s convenient for us. She keeps building. Every time we’ve waited for things to settle, she’s used the time to build something else.” I met his eyes. “If I leave the city, she builds without anything in the way.”

He was quiet.

“I need a few more days,” I said. “Before my parents make this unmovable.”

“And in those days?”

I thought about St. Mira’s. About the specific vulnerability of things/adjacent to composed people. About the way Denise’s face had looked, briefly, when she’d said “the children at St. Mira’s” at Seren-I hadn’t been there but I’d heard about it, the way I heard about everything.

I thought about how you planned something that looked like nothing.

“I need to think,” I said. “Properly. Without being reactive.”

Cyrus nodded slowly.

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