Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Chapter 80

DENISE

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I turned onto my side and looked at the window.

19

AG

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The city was the same. Spare and scattered, doing its late-night version of itself. I had grown up in a building in the east quarter and looked at a smaller version of this city through smaller windows, and the city had always had the quality of something that would continue regardless –that the specific weight of whatever was happening in whatever room you were looking out from was not its concern, which had been either comforting or enraging depending on the night.

Tonight I was going to decide it was comforting.

The arrangement was a contract. I had things I was building-the degree, the foundation, the investment positions that were already doing what Celina had projected they would do. I had Andrea back in the city. I had Mrs. Adeyemi and the children at St. Mira’s and the heating fund and the operational structure that was better than it had been six weeks ago. I had my name on things. I had the particular, specific satisfaction of a person who had walked out of a burning building and was building something new on ground that was genuinely hers.

None of that required Kieran’s personal history to be uncomplicated by me, neither did I own a right to it, there were things that I had not told Kieran about my past with Dante as well, it was the same. None of that required Eli to be a name that didn’t exist.

None of that required me to be anything other than what I had agreed to be—a woman with a contract, using the arrangement for exactly what it was designed for, with clear eyes and documented terms.

I believed this.

I believed it in the thorough, deliberate way of someone constructing a belief they needed to be solid. The sixty percent held steady in my chest, minimizing the damage that I felt, trying to provide logical explanations that I could hold onto to, for now.

The forty percent had gone quiet, which was not the same as being convinced but was sufficient for the night.

I closed my eyes.

Outside, the city did its indifferent, continuous thing.

1/3

15:36 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 80

At some point-I didn’t note when-I slept.

19

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In the morning I came downstairs at the usual time and the kitchen was empty.

A note on the counter, in Kieran’s handwriting-compressed, legible, the writing of someone who had learned to be efficient with paper:

*Early meeting. Coffee is made. Back by noon.*

I stood in the kitchen and looked at the note and at the coffee maker with its indicator light and at the window where the morning was doing the flat, grey thing it did when the sky hadn’t decided what it wanted yet.

I poured the coffee into my favourite cup that I had noted as my own, and took a deep breath and exhaled.

I sat at the counter and drank it and looked at the city and did not think about two in the morning or three-inch gaps in doors or names that were two syllables.

I thought about the foundation documents and the amendment to section four that Adaeze had responded to yesterday with a suggested reframe that I wanted to review. I thought about the university program’s first module, which started in three weeks and required a preparatory reading list I had not yet ordered. I thought about Andrea, who was starting her first full day at Maison Frey this morning and had sent a text at seven forty-three that was entirely lowercase and contained four exclamation points, which was the most un-Andrea punctuation she had ever deployed and which told me more about her state of mind than any fully composed sentence could.

I thought about useful things.

I finished the coffee.

I got up and rinsed the cup and set it on the drying rack with the particular deliberateness of someone returning a thing to its proper place, and then I went to the study and opened the foundation documents and began to work.

The question was still there. In the place I’d left it, with the same unanswered quality, the same open offer attached to it-*when you’re ready to ask, I’ll be ready to answer.*

I was not ready.

Or I was ready and I had decided that ready was not the same as wise, and that the answer, when it came, was going to require me to do something with it, and I needed to be certain I

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