Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 98

Chapter 98

DENISE

A pause

“Denise-”

“Please,” I said. “Trust me.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

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Then she took out her phone, connected it to the camera with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times, transferred the clip, and deleted the original.

“Sent,” she said. She showed me the camera’s gallery-empty of the clip. “Gone.”

“Thank you.”

She put the camera away.

The room was quiet for a moment.

“You’re protecting someone,” she said. Not accusatory. Just Andrea, reading accurately.

“I’m protecting you,” I said. Which was true. Which was also not the complete truth.

She accepted this because she was Andrea and she knew me and she had decided, at some point in our history, that trusting me was a decision she had made and would maintain.

“The children are all safe,” I said. “From St. Mira’s. All of them.”

Her expression changed-the relief arriving, the thing she’d been carrying since she’d seen the news moving through her face.

“All of them,” she said.

“All twelve.”

She let out a breath. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She reached over and put her hand over mine briefly. “That’s the main thing.”

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15:41 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 98

“It is,” I said.

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We sat for a while in the comfortable silence of people who had known each other long enough to inhabit quiet together.

She told me about the Maison Vidal morning. I listened. She told me about the apartment she’d found—a real one, a lease rather than the temporary arrangement she’d been in. I asked questions and she answered them and the room did what hospital rooms did in the morning when the acute part was over-it became ordinary, became a room rather than a crisis.

After she left, I picked up my phone.

The clip was there.

I watched it once more.

The corridor. The morning light. The woman in the doorway. The man’s back-the set of his shoulders, the dark hair, the specific quality of how he held himself, which I had been looking at for weeks with the attention of someone who had been paying close attention without fully acknowledging that they were paying close attention.

The child’s voice.

*Papa.*

The arms.

The man moving toward them before he had finished deciding.

I watched until it ended.

Then I put the phone face-down on the blanket.

I looked at the ceiling.

The white ceiling, the flat institutional white, the same ceiling it had been this morning and last night and all the hours in between.

I lay still and did the arithmetic that I had been doing in pieces for weeks, the fragments assembling themselves into something complete now. The photograph from Andrea-the woman’s back, the child’s hand. The name on the phone screen. *Something is happening around A.* The Paris trip. The dress that had been made by someone who said it was the kind of thing people killed for. *Why didn’t you tell me you were coming. What about Eli. Will you bring him.*

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15:41 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 98

And now: a man’s back in a corridor. A small drugged voice. Two arms coming up.

*Papa.*

The arithmetic had been running toward this answer for a long time.

I had been refusing to complete it.

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The clip was on my phone and I was the only one who had it now, which was what I had intended when I asked Andrea to send it and delete it. I had protected the woman’s privacy- that part was true. I had protected Andrea’s position-that was also true.

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