Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 95

Chapter 95

DANTE

Ward 4 was quieter than the main corridor.

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The particular quiet of a pediatric ward at morning-not silent, but reduced, the sounds organized around the needs of small people who were recovering from things. The nursing station had two staff members who looked up when I came through the double doors and assessed me with the professional attention of people whose job included deciding who belonged on their floor and who didn’t.

I walked with the certainty of someone who belonged.

This was a technique that had never failed me in rooms I wasn’t invited to. Certainty of bearing was its own credential in most spaces.

Room four was at the end of the corridor.

The door was slightly open.

I pushed it.

The room was small-standard pediatric configuration, a bed sized for a child, monitoring equipment doing its quiet work, the ambient sound of a building maintaining someone. The curtain was partially drawn around the bed. Morning light from the window, pale and indirect.

A woman in the chair beside the bed.

Cap pulled low, a mask covering the lower half of her face-the particular arrangement of someone who had not slept and had not left and had stopped caring, at some point in the night, about how they looked to anyone who came through the door. Her attention was entirely on the child in the bed.

The child was small.

Dark hair, the particular stillness of someone recently out of surgery, sleeping the deep sleep of someone whose body was doing significant work. His face was turned slightly toward the woman in the chair.

I stood in the doorway.

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Chapter 95

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She registered me without turning-I saw the shift in her posture, the slight change that happened when someone became aware of a new presence without yet deciding to acknowledge it.

Then she turned.

Dark eyes over the mask. Calm, assessing, the particular quality of someone who had already spent the night at the outer edge of what they could manage and had arrived at a place past fear and past performance.

She looked at me with the complete steadiness of someone who had nothing left to spend on pretending.

“You’re in the wrong room,” she said.

“I don’t think I am,” I said.

I came in and let the door close behind me. Not aggressively-I kept my movement measured, my bearing non-threatening. I had not come here to frighten a woman in a pediatric ward. I had come because information had arrived and I had followed it, and the following had led here, and here was a room with a child in it and a woman who was connected to Kieran Nightshade in a way that was relevant to things I was trying to resolve.

“Alyssa Stone,” I said.

She said nothing.

“My name is Dante Blackwood.” I stopped at a reasonable distance from the bed. Far enough to communicate that I was not approaching the child. Close enough that this was a conversation rather than a doorway exchange. “I think we have a shared interest.”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“You know of me,” I said. “I know you know of me. We’ve been in adjacent spaces for long enough that the knowing is mutual, even if the meeting is new.”

She looked at me over the mask. “My son is recovering from surgery.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I won’t take long.”

“You won’t take any time at all,” she said. “This is his room.”

“Kieran is engaged,” I said.

The

eyes

above the mask didn’t change. This was information she had, then. She had known.

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Chapter 95

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“He’s marrying someone else,” I said. “It’s been arranged and documented and publicly established. The Nightshade family has received her. The ceremony is being planned.” I paused. “Whatever understanding you and Kieran have had-whatever arrangement has existed between you-it is being superseded by something he chose to do without fully accounting for the effect on you.”

She was quiet.

“I’m not your enemy,” I said. “I have my own reasons for wanting the arrangement between Kieran and his fiancée to end. You have yours. Those reasons don’t need to be identical to make cooperation useful.” I held her gaze. “If we work together-if the right information reaches the right people at the right moment-the instability it creates would be enough to unravel what he’s built. The ceremony doesn’t happen. You are no longer the person he keeps at a careful distance while building his public life elsewhere.”

The room was quiet except for the monitoring equipment doing its steady work.

The child slept.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she reached up and removed the mask.

She was younger than I’d expected-or not younger, but the face of someone who had been carrying something heavy and had set it down somewhere in the past twenty-four hours and hadn’t yet picked it up again. Clean lines, tired eyes, the particular look of a woman who was exactly who she was and had stopped arranging that for anyone’s benefit.

“You came into my son’s hospital room,” she said.

“Yes.”

“While he’s recovering from surgery.”

“Yes.”

“To ask me to help you end Kieran’s engagement.”

“To point out that we have aligned interests.”

She looked at me with the eyes that had been doing their quiet, complete assessment since I’d come through the door.

“Get out of my son’s room,” she said.

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Chapter 95

“If you think about what I’m-”

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10

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