Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 96

Chapter 96

Chapter 96

KIERAN

I was halfway back to Denise’s room when James appeared at the end of the corridor.

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He had the specific quality of movement he used when something required my immediate attention without requiring a scene-unhurried enough not to alarm the ward staff, direct enough to communicate that unhurried was a performance.

“Dante Blackwood,” he said, when he reached me. “Pediatric ward. East wing. Someone matching his description went through the doors approximately eight minutes ago.”

I looked at him.

“Alyssa’s room,” I said.

“The ward directory has Stone listed on the board at the junction,” James said. “It’s visible from the main corridor.”

I was already moving.

The double doors to the east wing were thirty seconds from where I was standing. I covered them in less than that, through the doors, past the nursing station where a staff member started to say something about visiting hours that I acknowledged without stopping, down the corridor toward room four.

Dante was coming out of it.

He saw me at the same moment I saw him. He stopped in the corridor with the particular stillness of a man who had been caught in something and was deciding how to hold himself in the catching.

I stopped six feet from him.

“Back away from her,” I said.

My voice was even.

My wolf was not.

The suppressants had been reduced since yesterday-they always recalibrated after a

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significant activation, the body’s chemistry rebalancing after the kind of full engagement that the burning building had produced, and the recalibration meant the wolf was closer to the surface than it normally sat in the modern city version of my life. I was aware of this. I was managing it with the same discipline I managed everything, which was working at approximately seventy percent efficiency.

Dante looked at me with the expression of a man who was reading the seventy percent and filing it.

“I wanted to introduce myself,” he said.

“You introduced yourself in a pediatric ward to a woman whose child is recovering from surgery,” I said. “Walk away, Dante. Right now. While walking away is still the only thing that’s happened in this corridor.”

He looked at me steadily.

“This isn’t over,” he said.

Not as a performance-not the heightened register of someone making a declaration for an audience. He said it the way he said things that he meant in the flat, certain way of someone who had decided something and was informing rather than threatening.

“Walk away,” I said.

He did.

I watched him go-down the corridor, through the double doors, back into the main hospital. I watched until the doors had closed behind him and the corridor was empty and the ward had resumed its quiet work around me.

Then I turned.

And stood outside Alyssa’s door.

The door was closed. On the other side of it, a woman who had been in her son’s hospital room when Dante Blackwood had walked in and introduced himself. Who had been here since yesterday-alone, because that was how she managed significant things, had always been how she managed them, the specific self-sufficiency of someone who had learned early that depending on people created a vulnerability she preferred not to carry.

I stood outside the door and thought about knocking.

I thought about Denise in the room at the other end of the hospital, with the line in her hand and Juno’s drawing on the blanket.

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I knocked.

She opened it herself.

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The cap was still on-she had been wearing it since she’d arrived, some combination of habit and the particular privacy of a woman who didn’t want to be immediately recognizable in a public building. The mask was down now, her face visible, and she looked at me with the expression I knew as her directness register-not cold, not warm, the specific efficiency of a person who had decided that the most useful mode was the honest one.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Dante Blackwood came to this ward,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “He left.”

“I’m aware. I was in the corridor.”

She looked at me with the assessment she used when she was working out how much I knew relative to how much she’d decided to tell me. I had been the recipient of this look many times over three years and I had learned to wait it out.

“He found the room from the directory board,” I said. “I should have thought of that. I’m sorry.”

“He didn’t stay long,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“What you would expect him to say.” She looked at me steadily. “He thinks we have aligned

interests.”

“Do you think that?”

She looked at me for a moment longer than the question required.

“No,” she said.

I held her gaze.

“Kieran.” Her voice had shifted slightly-not softer, but more direct, which for Alyssa was its own version of softer. “What are you doing here. Actually.”

“There was a fire yesterday,” I said. “Denise was inside the building. I’m at this hospital because she was admitted for smoke inhalation and chemical exposure.” I paused. “I was heading back

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to her room when James flagged Dante.”

Alyssa went very still.

“Is she alright?” she said.

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“She will be,” I said. “They’re keeping her for observation. The children from the orphanage are all safe.”

Something moved across her face-the particular quality of a woman processing information about someone she knew only in outline but had been thinking about more than that outline suggested.

“You should go back to her,” she said.

“I wanted to make sure you were-”

“We’re fine,” she said. “We were fine before you arrived and we were fine after Dante left and we will continue to be fine.” She said it without sharpness, just the particular Alyssa directness that had always been one of the things I most recognized about her. “Go back to your fiancée, Kieran.”

The word sat between us for a moment.

Not accusatory. Not weighted with anything she was trying to communicate beneath it. Just the word, placed there, with the honest acknowledgment of what was true.

I opened my mouth to say something-the thing I had been constructing since the plane from Paris, the complete version, the honest accounting of what Alyssa was to me and what Denise was becoming and what the space between those two things actually looked like when you mapped it without the careful management I’d been applying.

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