Page 30 of Guarded By The Alpha

I let him keep it. He needed the armor. I understood armor.

After the team broke, Roan kept me back.

"Smaller room," he said, and led me down the corridor to a space I hadn't been in before—on purpose, I realized. He was avoiding the briefing room. The table.

I didn't comment on it.

He sat across from me and laid out my part in getting my mother out with the thoroughness of a man who needed structure to function. Fallback spot with Tara and Maddox during the first push in. Open line for reading the environment and catching patterns. No moving from the fallback point without his say-so.

I listened. I asked four questions—how they'd break the wards, Tara's role with my mother, fallback routes, what we'd do if the blind room wasn't where I'd placed it. He answered each one fully.

"You're not leaving me out of it," I said when he finished. "You're folding me in."

Something flickered behind his eyes. "Yes."

"Okay."

He looked at me when I said it—really looked, the way he'd looked at me in the warehouse before any of this began. The gray-blue steadiness of my gaze meeting the gold-edged intensity of his.

I saw the moment something in him shifted. The wound he'd been carrying since someone he was guarding died six years ago, the one that made him believe discipline was survival and feeling was the thing that got people killed—something in the shape of it moved.

He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

Some evidence doesn't need to be narrated.

The afternoon brought Gideon's next find, and the mood in the building changed.

I was in my room, going over the plan on the secured laptop, when the knock came. Not Tara this time. Not Maddox, who said most of what he meant through quiet action rather than announcement.

Roan.

I opened the door, and he stood in the corridor with an expression I was learning to read: the jaw set, the stillness, the eyes that went to me before anything else.

"We need to talk," he said. "Not about the rescue."

I stepped back and let him in.

He moved to the window—not sitting, not making himself comfortable. Standing with his shoulders set and his hands loose at his sides, looking out at the courtyard he'd paced for forty minutes this morning while the wolf inside him demanded something he wasn't prepared to give.

"The Council's own messages show the order on you was approved below Drake's level," he said, not turning around. "A layer that runs upward through their ranks to a decision made six weeks before you ever walked into that warehouse."

I waited. I knew this wasn't all of it.

"They flagged your blood waking six weeks ago. They put Drake in place to watch. The warehouse was likely staged—the tip arranged to drop you into this agency's path at a chosen moment."

The words landed with specific weight, but I'd already been building toward this. The Council steering my exposure. The systematic feel of everything that had happened since.

"You think the warehouse was a setup," I said. "Not just for me. For all of it."

He turned then. The gold was at the edges of his eyes, not quite human, and his jaw was tight with something that looked like controlled devastation.

"I think they planned past the warehouse," he said. "I think they put you close to this agency—to me specifically—because they knew what would happen."

The bond pulsed between us, warm and present and damning.

"They knew your wolf would know me," I said quietly.

"I don't know." His voice was lower than I'd ever heard it. "But if the tip that brought me to that warehouse was arranged—if they worked out that putting a sleeping bloodline near a strong wolf would speed it up—then the question I've been avoiding all day is whether they wanted this."