Page 2 of Guarded By The Alpha

Eyes flashing gold as coins in the fluorescent dark.

Not reflective. Not a trick of the light.

Gold and alive and then dimmed back to something that passed for human.

He went absolutely still the moment he scented me.

Total predator stillness. The kind I'd only ever seen in footage of big cats right before they struck—that perfect frozen moment where every muscle in the body aligns toward a single purpose.

Run.

Every rational signal in my body screamed it.

Not one muscle obeyed.

And I didn't understand that. I have spent my whole life understanding my own reactions a half-second before they happen, and standing in that basement I did not understand a single thing my body was doing.

Heat flooded my sternum—sudden, sourceless, nothing I had language for. Like my chest had decided to become a compass and was swinging hard toward north, except north was a man who had just been something else and was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room.

My feet were planted. My breath turned shallow.

My hands didn't shake.

My hands never shook, and somehow that was the most frightening thing in the room.

He was enormous. Six-four at least, broad-shouldered, built like violence that had learned to wear a suit. Dark hair cropped short. Hard jaw. Deep-set eyes that had just been gold and were now something darker, something that passed for human if you didn't look too long. Scars I could see at his collar line, disappearing down beneath fabric that probably cost more than my monthly rent.

He was staring at me with an intensity that should have been terrifying.

It was.

It was also something else I refused to name.

His jaw tightened. His nostrils flared. Something happened behind his eyes—a war, brief and total, fought without moving a single visible muscle—and my camera hand rose before my conscious mind sent the instruction.

I was documenting him.

Of course I was documenting him. That's what I did. That's what I was. It was the only thing I knew how to do with my hands when the rest of me had stopped making sense.

He came toward me slowly. Hands visible at his sides. Every movement controlled to the point of visible cost—I could see the effort in the tendons of his neck, in the way his fingers flexed once against his thighs before going deliberately still again.

"You need to come with me." His voice was lower than it should have been. Rough at the edges, like something had scraped his throat raw from the inside. "What I am isn't the threat tonight."

I should refuse.

I should run.

I should do literally anything other than stand here memorizing the way he moved, the way he held himself, the way that terrifying stillness wasn't pointed at me even though everything about him said predator and everything about me should have said prey.

"You were shifting," I said.

My voice came out steady. I hated how steady it was.

"Yes," he said.

No deflection. No lie.

Just yes, delivered like a fact, like evidence, like the simplest truth in the world offered without being asked for it.