Page 28 of Guarded By The Alpha

I stood in the dark of my room and felt the new math settle into my bones.

The question wasn't whether we could get her out in time.

The question was whether Drake already knew we had the location—or whether he was moving on something else entirely, something that would put him at Nova before we ever reached Elena.

Chapter 9

What the Council Took

NOVA

I woke to the absence of him before I registered the pale light seeping through the window.

The bond—that strange, warm thread I was still learning to name—pointed toward the east side of the building like a compass needle. Not close. Moving. The low pull of it had become background noise over the past few days, constant as my own heartbeat, but this morning it felt stretched, deliberate. Roan was outside, somewhere in the cold, putting distance between himself and the building.

Between himself and me.

I sat up slowly, cataloguing the familiar ache in muscles I'd used in ways that had nothing to do with crime scene work. The briefing room. The table. His hands.

Stop.

I pressed my palms against my eyes and breathed through the heat that curled low in my belly at the memory. We had twenty-four hours. Less, now. Drake moving faster had compressed everything—the plan to get my mother out, the prep, the window to reach her before the Council moved her somewhere we couldn't.

I needed to be sharp. I needed to think like the woman who'd spent seven years walking into aftermath and walking back out untouched.

The bond pulsed once, warm and pointed, and I ignored it.

My feet hit the cold floor. I dressed in the dark with the efficiency of someone who'd learned to be ready to move—practical clothes, boots that could handle running if it came to that, hair pulled back and out of my face. My camera bag sat in the corner where I'd left it, the familiar weight of it calling to me like an old friend. I didn't pick it up. Not yet. Today wasn't about documentation.

Today was about getting my mother back.

The corridor outside my room was quiet, the building running on its pre-dawn rhythm of skeleton shifts and sleeping people. I moved toward the common area by instinct, following the faint smell of coffee that meant someone was already awake.

Tara.

She was at the small table in the corner of the common space, two cups in front of her, steam rising from both. She looked up when I came in and didn't seem surprised to see me.

"I figured you'd be up early," she said. "Sit."

I sat. She pushed one of the cups toward me without ceremony.

"Roan's been outside almost an hour," Tara said, watching me over the rim of her cup. "He does that when he's working through something he doesn't want anyone else to see."

I wrapped my hands around the warmth of the ceramic and said nothing.

"The five a.m. walk of the grounds is routine," she went on. "The extra forty minutes in the courtyard after isn't."

"I'm not asking about his morning routine."

"No." Tara's mouth curved slightly. "You're not asking about anything. That's the problem."

I took a sip of the coffee—strong, slightly bitter, exactly what I needed—and let the silence sit between us. Tara was good at silence. She'd proven that in the medical bay on my first night, when she'd run tests and asked questions and never once made me feel like I was being handled rather than helped.

"The timeline got shorter," I said finally. "Twenty-four hours instead of forty-eight."

"I know."

"My part is the fallback spot, an open line, reading patterns from a safe distance."