Page 18 of Guarded By The Alpha

Then he moved the briefing on without a word.

Which is as close as Caleb Thorne comes to saying I heard you.

Down the east corridor, in a room she wasn't supposed to be able to hear from, I knew—without knowing how—that Nova Hale had heard every word.

The briefing broke up. I held my place at the table until the room emptied, then walked the east corridor toward command.

Her door was closed. The light underneath was still on.

I stopped.

This wasn't a check. I had no reason to be here that I could put on paper. I was a man standing outside her door at nine in the morning because the wolf had run out of anywhere else to be, and I was finished pretending I could keep the line between those two things drawn forever.

I knocked once.

She opened the door with the look of a woman who'd been expecting this and had decided not to pretend otherwise.

"The briefing," she said. Not a question.

"You heard."

"I heard." Her gray-blue eyes held mine with that steady, reading quality I was learning to know—taking it in, filing it, deciding what it meant. "She's under your protection. That's not on the table."

I said nothing.

"That wasn't the job talking," she said.

"No." It came out lower than I meant it. More certain. "It wasn't."

Something moved through her face—not softening, something more exact than that. The look of a woman taking in a piece of evidence she meant to keep.

"You're mine to protect, Nova." I held her eyes. "I need you to know the difference between that and the job."

She looked at me a long moment. The corridor was quiet around us, the building running its daytime rhythm behind the closed doors on either side.

"I know," she said finally. "I'm still working out what to do with it."

It was the most honest thing she could have said. I nodded once and walked to command, because it was the right call, and because staying would have asked a different kind of decision out of me—one I wasn't ready to say out loud.

But the wolf was already sure.

It had been sure since the warehouse.

Chapter 6

What The Body Knows

NOVA

The facility dropped to emergency lighting at 2:14 AM, and I woke with the taste of something vast and dark still pressing against the edges of my mind.

Not a nightmare. Not exactly. Something older than that, some pressure I couldn't name. My sternum ached with a warmth that had no rational source. I sat up in the red-tinged dark and ran my professional inventory—hands steady, heartbeat elevated, no external threat in the room. The inventory didn't help. The source wasn't external.

Five days. I'd been inside this facility for five days, calling the pull toward Roan Vale something clinical. Something bloodline. Something I could document and file away with the rest of the evidence I'd collected about this supernatural world I'd stumbled into.

The emergency lighting stripped that language away.

The ache in my chest was centered exactly where he was. Two corridors east and down, if my body's insistent compass was accurate. In the red-dark at 2:14 AM, with the facility's warm operational hum replaced by backup quiet, I couldn't document my way out of it anymore.