Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 93

Chapter 93

KIERAN

The door opened at seven forty-three.

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I knew the time because I had been watching the clock on the wall with the particular attention of someone who had nothing useful to do and had chosen the clock as a fixed point. Denise had been asleep for an hour-properly asleep, the deeper version that arrived after the congee and Juno’s visit, her breathing evening out into the rhythm that meant the body had finally accepted that the immediate crisis was over and was doing its accounting.

I had been in the chair.

I was still in the chair when the door opened.

Dante came in the way he moved through rooms that he had decided he had a right to be in— with the specific, unearned certainty of someone who had never developed the habit of checking whether his presence was welcome before establishing it. He was dressed for the day already, jacket, the particular put-together quality of a man who had been awake for a while and had used the time productively in terms of appearance.

He saw Denise first.

Then he saw me.

He crossed to the bed in four strides and reached for her hand, which woke her-she startled at the contact, her eyes opening with the disoriented alertness of someone pulled from deep sleep by something unexpected.

“What happened,” Dante said, and his voice had the compressed urgency of something that wanted to be louder and was choosing not to be. “Who did this. How did you get here, what-”

“Dante.” Her voice was rough from the smoke, and surprised, and not pleased.

“I heard about the fire this morning.” He was looking at her with the expression he couldn’t control, the unmanaged one, the one I had been watching him fail to contain for weeks. His hand was over hers on the blanket. “I came straight here.”

I stayed in the chair.

The room had become very small very quickly.

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Chapter 93

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Denise looked at his hand on hers. Then she looked at me. The look was brief and contained the particular quality of someone who was managing several things and choosing which to address first.

“I’m fine,” she said to Dante. “It’s smoke inhalation. They kept me overnight for observation.”

“You shouldn’t be-” He stopped. Looked at me properly for the first time since he’d walked in. “You should have been with her. Your plans fell through and you showed up as an afterthought.”

The ward was quiet around the three of us.

I looked at him.

“At least I got her out of a burning building,” I said. “You left her in a burning car to go and comfort Elena.”

The room stopped.

Dante went very still.

Not the managed stillness-not the composed, professional stillness of a man controlling his presentation. The other kind. The stillness of someone who has just understood that information they believed was private is not private, that a failure witnessed only by themselves and the person they failed has been seen by an audience they hadn’t accounted for.

He looked at me with the exposed quality of exactly that.

He had not known I knew.

The knowing itself he could have managed-Dante was good at managing things once he understood the perimeter of them. What he couldn’t manage in this moment was the not- having-known, the realization that the perimeter had been larger than he’d mapped it.

Denise was looking at the ceiling.

DENISE

I watched both of them and felt something that wasn’t quite any single feeling but was all of them compressed into something too tired to be separated.

The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been an hour ago. White, flat, institutional.

“Dante,” I said.

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Chapter 93

He looked at me.

“You need to leave.”

His jaw tightened. “Denise-”

“I’m not asking.”

:

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“He only came because his meeting was cancelled,” Dante said, and the words had the quality of something that had been prepared, a thing he’d decided to deploy. “You were convenient. Don’t mistake convenience for care.”

I breathed carefully around the tightness in my chest.

“Leave,” I said.

“I’m not going to stand here and watch you—”

“Dante.” My voice was steady, which surprised me given the state of my throat. “I have smoke in my lungs and a line in my hand and I have been awake since yesterday afternoon. I am asking you, clearly and without ambiguity, to leave this room.”

A silence.

Kieran spoke from the chair.

“Do you have people following her?” His voice was even. Not raised-the controlled quality that was more deliberate than volume. “Because showing up at a hospital within hours of an incident that wasn’t publicly reported yet is an interesting arrival time.”

Dante looked at him. “I was concerned for her safety.”

“That’s called stalking,” Kieran said.

“I doubt very much that you have her best interests-”

“I have been nothing but polite to you,” Kieran said, still at the same even register. “Consistently. You have been the one following us, showing up in venues, sending photographs, and now appearing in a hospital room before the ward has opened visiting hours.”

“Kieran,” I said.

He looked at me.

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Chapter 93

“Don’t reply to him. He’s trying to make you react. Stay calm.”

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