Page 13 of Guarded By The Alpha

There was a phrase in there—people kept as leverage. Bloodlines held as insurance against the children who came after them.

It did not name my mother.

It didn't have to.

The wound I'd been keeping behind glass cracked in a way I couldn't quite close again. I sat with it in the quiet of my room and felt the full weight of a thing I'd spent thirteen years not looking at, starting to take up room I didn't have anywhere to put it.

By four, the timeline on my laptop had grown to three pages.

I'd laid the Council's patterns against the public missing-persons numbers from the places they worked hardest. It wasn't proof. A pattern is never proof. But it was there, dated and lined up and impossible to stop seeing once I'd seen it.

I closed the laptop and stared at the wall for a full minute—a strange amount of stillness for a woman who thinks by moving.

Then I opened it again and started laying my mother's disappearance against the dates of everything they'd done.

A knock. Two sharp raps, a pause, then the door opening.

Roan stood in the doorway with a page in his hand and stopped.

I watched him read the shape of what was on my screen from across the room. Watched his jaw set in the way I now knew meant he was holding words back. Watched the stillness that comes right before he decides something.

"You'll have everything we find," he said finally. "The moment we find it."

Not comfort. A promise.

"I know," I said.

The alarm went off before the quiet had time to settle.

One tone—short, hard, cutting straight through the building's low hum. Something had hit the eastern edge.

The corridor outside my room changed in under a minute.

Footsteps—fast, controlled, the rhythm of people moving with purpose instead of fear. Voices somewhere off, clipped and steady. The whole place shifted from quiet to full motion with an ease that told me this was rehearsed, ordinary, the kind of thing they'd run so many times it lived in the body now.

I went to my window.

The yard below was a flat run of concrete between the main building and the eastern wall. Usually empty. Now there was one figure crossing the open ground toward the east, with a stride that dried my mouth out.

Roan.

I'd watched him move through this place for thirty-six hours. I knew the shape of him by now the way I know the shape of a scene—by the quality of the stillness before he moves, by what he does with his hands, by the exact weight of his attention in a room.

What I was looking at was none of that.

His walk was wrong. Longer, lower, the human neatness peeled away and replaced by something that didn't answer to restraint. The careful control he carried into every single moment was just gone, and what it had been covering moved like danger poured into the shape of a man.

He was not crossing that yard like a commander checking a wall.

He was hunting.

The thing wearing his shape was tracking something, and even through the glass, even a floor up, the animal of it landed in my chest like a frequency I hadn't known I could pick up.

Wolf-adjacent, Tara had said. You can hear things most people can't.

I was hearing it now.

I pressed my hand flat to the cold glass, my breath fogging it. Below me, Roan reached the edge of the yard and stopped. Went completely still in that predator way I'd seen in the warehouse basement—the stillness that means something is about to happen and the only question left is how much blood is in it.