Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 83

Chapter 83

LYRA

The children on the upper floors.

Probably safe.

19

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Mrs. Adeyemi, who was in her sixties and who ran the building and who would be-where? In her rooms. In the back section, possibly, depending on the night, depending on the specific configuration of where she slept and worked and spent her evenings.

I did not know where Mrs. Adeyemi slept.

I had not asked.

I had not asked because asking would have required me to look directly at what I was planning and I had been managing a very careful angle of vision for two weeks, the kind of angle that let you see the outline of a thing without seeing the specific, human detail of it.

The specific, human detail was present now.

I picked up my phone.

I looked at the message.

*Your word or we close the arrangement.*

My mother had stopped talking about Verona.

She was looking at me with the expression she used when she had said something twice and I hadn’t responded.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“Marco’s call,” she said. “Thursday. You haven’t confirmed.”

“I’ll confirm,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer-the particular maternal assessment that I had never been able to fully deflect, the one that saw past the surface more than I wanted it to-and then returned to her coffee.

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15:36 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 83

I looked at the phone.

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The storage room. The wiring. The upper floors where the children were probably safe.

The documentation that would burn. Thirty years of children who had begun their lives in that building, whose records were the only formal evidence of who they had been at the beginning-where they had come from, what had happened to them, the paper trail of small lives that had passed through that house and deserved to have their passing through recorded

somewhere.

I thought about the child whose medical procedure Denise had paid for.

Whether that child’s file was in the storage room.

Whether that child, grown older now, might someday want to know something about where they had come from and find the record gone.

I was not a person who thought about things like this.

I had been very careful, over a very long time, not to be a person who thought about things like this, because thinking about things like this was the kind of thinking that made it difficult to do what needed doing in the specific, unsentimental world I had grown up in and intended to continue occupying.

And yet.

The phone was in my hand.

I typed: *Close the arrangement.*

I looked at the two words for a long moment.

Then I sent it.

I put the phone in my bag and picked up my coffee cup and looked at my mother, who was looking at me.

“Thursday,” I said. “I’ll call Marco’s people today and confirm.”

Her expression did something that was not quite relief and was not quite happiness but sat between them–the expression of a woman who had been hoping for a version of her daughter and was receiving something that approximated it and was choosing to accept the approximation.

“Good,” she said.

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15:36 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 83

I drank my coffee.

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