Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 78

Chapter 78

Chapter 78

DENISE

19

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I woke at two in the morning and lay still for a while, listening to the penthouse breathe.

This was a thing I had noticed about the building-it had its own nighttime quality, different from the daytime one, the way all large structures did when the people inside them had stopped moving. The particular silence of good insulation and solid walls and the city outside doing its reduced version of itself at this hour. Usually I found it easy to sleep in. Tonight the silence was doing nothing useful and I had been lying in it for forty minutes watching the ceiling and declining to examine why.

I got up.

Not for any specific reason. Not with a destination. Just the particular restlessness of a body that had decided sleep was finished before the mind had agreed to it, and the knowledge from experience that lying in the dark fighting it produced nothing except a worse version of the same wakefulness with added frustration.

I pulled on the cardigan I kept at the end of the bed and went to the door.

The corridor was dark except for the ambient light that came from the city through the high windows at the far end-that particular urban half-light that was never quite darkness in a penthouse at this height. Enough to navigate by. Enough to see the shapes of things.

I was going to the kitchen for water, or tea, or something that would give the insomnia a purpose and me something to do with my hands.

I was halfway down the corridor when I heard his voice.

The study door was not fully closed. It sat at the angle of a door that had been pulled to without latching, the three or four inches of gap that happened when someone stepped through a door in the dark and didn’t reach back to seal it properly. Enough for sound to carry.

I stopped.

Not deliberately. The way you stopped when something arrived in the air around you before your brain had processed what it was-the automatic pause of a nervous system registering information.

His voice, low. The tone he used on calls that were personal rather than professional, the

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15:35 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 78

ཉྙ

19

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register I had learned to distinguish over weeks of proximity. Not the business precision. The other one-careful, warm at the edges, the tone of someone who was trying to give the person on the other end something that required effort to give.

I stood in the corridor.

My wolf hearing, even suppressed-even managed with the suppressants that had been standard since I was fifteen, that I had been more consistent about than most because inconsistency in pack environments had costs I had learned early-did what it did in quiet spaces with thin gaps in closed doors.

It caught what was there to catch.

*-didn’t tell me you were coming-*

A pause. Her voice from the phone, not assembling into words at this distance but present- the frequency of it, the particular note of someone who was explaining something or asking something, the timbre landing even when the content didn’t.

*-should see each other-*

Another pause. Longer. Him listening.

*-I can cancel tomorrow. If you-yes, I can move it.* A brief silence. *What about Eli? Will you bring him?*

The name was clean and small and arrived without distortion.

Eli.

*-of course I want to see him-*

I became very aware of standing in a corridor at two in the morning in a borrowed cardigan outside a door that was not quite closed.

I took one breath.

Then I went back upstairs.

I did not turn the light on.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and looked at the city through the window-the particular late-night version of it, sparse and scattered, the lights of buildings and the

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15:35 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 78

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ร

19

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