Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 90

Chapter 90

KIERAN

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I thought about a small child holding on to something with that specific focused grip. Two years and eight months old, with a situation that Alyssa had called urgent and that I had not yet had news about.

I thought about sitting on the ground outside a burning building holding someone I had been treating as a contract.

I breathed. Denise said something.

I leaned closer to hear her better. The smoke was still in her voice-rough at the edges, the vocal quality of someone who had been breathing something they shouldn’t have been breathing.

“The children,” she said.

“Out,” I said. “All of them. Mrs. Adeyemi has them.”

She closed her eyes.

Not losing consciousness-he monitored this with the wolf’s attention, which was still fully present and not stepping back, the suppressants doing nothing against this level of activation. She was simply closing her eyes the way someone did when the thing they had been holding with everything they had was handed to someone else.

I let her close them. I sat on the ground with her and did not move and the fire service worked around them and James spoke to people and the evening did what evenings did-continued, indifferent, the city beyond the street going about its business with no awareness of having been relevant. I became aware of my hands.

This was not immediate. It arrived gradually, the way things arrived when the acute phase of something was ending and the body began its accounting. My hands, which were holding her -one at her back, one where her arm met mine-were not steady.

I looked at them.

Shaking.

Fine, small, the particular tremor of something that was not cold and was not effort. I looked at

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15:38 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 90

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his hands shaking against her coat and understood with the complete, simple clarity of someone who had run out of the capacity for self-deception that this was not something that happened to me.

I did not shake.

I had been in situations that required steadiness and had been steady. Had been in rooms where the wrong expression cost significant things and had kept the right expression. Had been on a plane forty thousand feet in the air looking at a dress box and acknowledged something true about himself without it manifesting as anything visible or physical.

My hands were shaking.

Denise opened her eyes.

She looked at my hands. Looked at my face. Said nothing, which was the right thing-the only thing, in this moment, that would have been the right thing.

Then she moved her hand from his arm to his hand.

Just that. She put her hand over mine and held it with the same focused grip of someone who had decided that holding on was the current priority, and my hand under hers did not stop shaking immediately, but it stopped shaking sooner than it would have stopped on its own.

“Kieran.” James, close now, crouching to his level with the professional care of a man who was managing several things simultaneously and had arrived at this one. “Paramedics are here. They want to assess her.”

I looked at James.

“She needs to be assessed for chemical inhalation,” James said. “There’s something they found in the building-it’s not standard fire, the units are saying it’s been prepared. Someone set this.” A pause. “She needs the paramedics.”

I knew this. I had known it since the corridor, since her scent had reached me with the chemical underneath it that was not smoke and was not accelerant and was the specific, targeted thing it was.

Someone had done this deliberately.

I held this knowledge in the part of me that was still the modern city version of myself—the part that ran companies and managed councils and handled necessary things with the particular focused efficiency of someone who understood that emotion and action occupied different time slots.

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15:38 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 90

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