Bonded To The Dysfunctional Alpha

Chapter 5: None of Your Business

Sophie’s POV

I did not want to believe it. I stood there in the driveway with Dylan’s words sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong, sharp and lodged and refusing to go down. I looked at Tyler, waiting for him to say something, anything, a denial, an explanation, even anger would have been better than the silence he gave me.

.

His blue eyes looking somewhere past Dylan’s shoulder like the whole conversation was beneath him. The silence stretched, and my stomach turned slowly because silence was its own kind of answer and I did not like what this one was saying.

Then Tyler smiled, not the smirk I’d catalogued over the last few days.

I frowned. “What’s funny?”

He didn’t answer me. He looked at Dylan instead.

“Are you done?” His voice was completely even.

Dylan blinked. Ava had gone very still beside me.

“She already knows,” Tyler said. “Everything you just said. Sophie and I are handling it. Together.” He let that land for exactly one second before continuing. “So if you’re finished trying to start problems on my land, I’d suggest you leave. Now. Before this becomes something you can’t walk back from.”

Dylan opened his mouth.

“I’m not joking.” Tyler’s voice dropped a register. “You walk out of here with your dignity, or I remove you from my pack publicly, and you can explain to everyone who asks exactly how that happened. Your choice. You have ten seconds.”

The driveway was completely silent. Dylan looked at me. His expression had shifted from cold authority into something I hadn’t seen on his face in a long time.

“Sophie.” His voice dropped too quieter now, aimed only at me. “This isn’t about control. The arrangement with Marcus is for the pack. If you marry him, our borders expand, our numbers grow, and we gain access to resources we’ve been fighting for for years. This is bigger than what you want right now.”

“No,” I said.

“Sophie…”

“No.” The word came out clean and I didn’t flinch from it. “I am not a treaty. I am not a border negotiation. You do not get to hand me to someone and call it strategy.” I looked at him steadily. “I have the right to choose. And I’m choosing.”

“You’re choosing based on feelings you don’t fully understand yet.”

“Then that’s my mistake to make.”

Dylan stared at me for a long moment. Something moved through his expression that I couldn’t name, something underneath the anger that looked almost like grief. Then it locked away and the stone face came back.

He looked at Tyler one last time. “This isn’t over.”

“It is for today,” Tyler said. “Leave.”

Dylan turned and Ryan followed without a word, still not meeting anyone’s eyes, and I watched them walk to the car and pull out of the driveway and disappear down the road and I kept my face completely still until they were gone.

Then I grabbed Tyler’s hand and pulled him away from the others.

He let me. Just barely. I could feel the resistance in him, the way he moved like a man deciding whether to comply or not, and he chose to follow me around the side of the house where the noise of the pack faded and it was just us and the sound of wind moving through the trees.

I turned to face him. “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Is it true? What Dylan said?”

He looked at me but said nothing.

“Tyler.”

“It’s none of your business.”

The words landed flat and clean and I felt them somewhere behind my sternum, a dull specific hurt.

I stared at him. “None of my business.”

He held my gaze without apology.

“After everything,” I said, and I hated how my voice sounded, careful and controlled, holding something back by sheer force of will.

Maybe that was the truth of it. Maybe I had constructed an entire story inside my head and furnished it with feelings that only existed on my side. Maybe he had touched me and smirked at me and pulled me into his side in front of my brother because it was convenient, because I was useful, because it was easy, and I had taken all of that and built something out of it that was never there.

I knew what I felt. That part wasn’t confusion. The feelings were real and they were mine and they sat in my chest solid and inconvenient and completely unwilling to be argued away.

Whether any of it was returned was apparently none of my business.

“Stay away from me, Sophie.” He finally speaks. “You don’t know what you’re walking into. Keep your distance.”

He turned to leave but I reached for his hand before I decided to.

My fingers closed around his wrist and he stopped moving and for one second he just stood there with his back to me.

Then he turned, It happened so fast I couldn’t register it at first, his hand closed around mine and then I was moving and my back met the wall and he was in front of me and I lost a full breath to the impact, his forearm braced above my head, his body close enough that there was no version of this that was casual.

Our faces were inches apart. I could feel his hot breath on my face. He was looking at me with those blue eyes gone dark and something in them that was not indifference, not even slightly, and my heart was doing something completely unhinged behind my ribs.

He pressed closer and my eyes went wider. I could swear that I felt his hard c**k pressing against my lap, my entire train of thought derailed completely.

He was looking at me like a man furious at himself for something he couldn’t stop.

I opened my mouth but nothing came.