Page 14 of Guarded By The Alpha

His head turned.

Not the way a man checks a sightline. The way an animal finds a sound pitched below what people can hear.

I knew, with a certainty I couldn't document or explain, that whatever had tripped the alarm was still out there.

And that Roan, thirty feet below me in the failing light, was the only thing standing between it and the building.

And that the thing asleep in my blood—waking now, and apparently easy to follow for anyone who knew the scent of it—was the reason it had come.

Chapter 5

The Scout at the Wall

ROAN

The scout's scent hung in the air like a taunt.

I stood at the eastern edge in the dark, completely still, following the fading trail through the gap in the wards Gideon had flagged three days ago. Not Drake. The scent was wrong—younger, lower in the order, carrying the particular mark of wolves who'd sworn to the Council. I'd crossed that scent twice before in the field. But it told me what I needed to know, and what it told me was bad.

Someone with the Council behind them had stood within forty meters of a building that didn't exist on any map.

Jace came out of the warded dark thirty seconds after I caught the retreat. He'd run the whole outer line in four minutes flat, fast even for him. We didn't speak. Wolf to wolf, the conclusion passed between us without a word.

Whoever this was had come to confirm, not to break in.

Found it. She's here.

The Council wasn't moving tonight because they were building toward something bigger. Patience, from people like Drake, was never a comfort. It was a man taking his time to line up the shot.

I took in every thread of the scout's scent the way I take in everything I don't intend to lose—what kind of wolf, which pack he answered to, the specific staleness that clings to anyone who's spent too long inside Council territory. I marked the way he'd come in. The one gap in the wards, the single unwatched seam in a line that was otherwise solid.

He'd known to use it.

That was the part that sat wrong in my chest.

I stood in the dark long enough to let the wolf's fury wear itself down to something I could carry without it showing on me. The animal wanted to run it down. Wanted to follow that fading scent until it ended in blood and quiet. Wanted the threat gone before it could circle back toward⁠—

I shut that down.

Behind me, Jace took the east wall without being asked. Good. He'd hold it until I sent someone to spell him.

Nova was still at her window, one floor up.

I didn't look. I knew she was there because my body had already found her, the way it found every line of sight in a room—without asking me, without stopping, a compass I hadn't worked out how to switch off. Her scent drifted down from the corridor window, faint and unmistakable, and the wolf pushed against the inside of me hard enough to leave marks on whatever was holding it.

I walked back inside.

The report took forty minutes to write. My hands were steady the whole time. I made sure of it.

We gathered at six in the main room.

I ran it the way I'd run a hundred of them. Jace on the walls—his call was to double the southeast watch and pull the outer wards in by thirty meters to close the gap the scout had used. Right. I gave him a nod and it was done.

Gideon sat at his screens, running Drake's last known movements with the unhurried focus of a man who already had a theory and was just gathering the proof. He said little, which always meant he was thinking hard.

Maddox went looking for somewhere else we could put her—safe houses inside a couple hundred miles, working out how we'd move her if it came to that, the quiet competence that made him the man you wanted when everything went sideways. He'd have three real options by noon. He always did.

The whole meeting, some part of me was listening to a keyboard down the east corridor.