Page 33 of Guarded By The Alpha

Then Jace, flat: "Clear."

Through the comm, through the bond, I felt Nova's spike of fear harden into something else. Not relief. Not quite. The particular focus of someone braced for the next threat.

"Moving to you," I said.

We reached the car at 5:48. Maddox had the engine running, Tara already at the door as Elena came out of the treeline between me and Jace.

Nova was out of the vehicle before I could tell her to stay in it. This wasn't about the plan. This was a woman who'd spent thirteen years not knowing if her mother was alive, watching the proof of that life walk toward her in the gray before dawn.

Elena's face when she recognized her daughter was the one thing I would never go back over later. Some things aren't meant to be catalogued.

They held each other in the shadow of the car while Tara checked Elena over with steady hands and Maddox watched the approaches and Jace slid silently into the passenger seat like the last three minutes had been someone else's problem.

I took my place and said nothing.

The drive back was forty minutes of careful quiet, broken by Tara's checks and the soft sounds of two women learning how to be in the same space after more than a decade apart. Nova didn't let go of her mother's hands. She kept her voice low, asking questions I couldn't fully hear over the engine—questions that had probably been sitting in her chest since she was sixteen.

I watched the road. Watched the feed. Listened for any sign we were being followed.

Through the bond, I felt everything she was feeling anyway. The relief so large it threatened to turn into grief. The fierce, protective focus of someone who'd finally gotten back a thing that had been taken. And under all of it, steady and warm and pointed at me—the specific quality of a woman who knew exactly who'd made this possible and was filing it away in the place she kept things she meant to keep.

She caught my eye in the mirror once. Three seconds. Her gray-blue gaze holding mine with a weight no words could have carried.

I held it. Then I looked back at the road.

We reached the agency at 5:51, the sky just starting to gray at its eastern edge. Tara took Elena to the medical bay with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before—not rushed, but sure, her voice carrying the specific reassurance of a professional who understood that competence was its own kind of comfort.

Nova went with her mother. She held Elena's hand through the first check, her face carrying the compressed stillness I'd learned to read as her version of feeling too much to safely show.

I stayed in the corridor.

I didn't go into the medical bay. I didn't knock, didn't hover at the threshold, didn't make my presence something she had to manage. I just held the space outside—checking the building, watching the comm, existing in the exact spot where I could reach her in three seconds if anything went wrong.

An hour passed. Then another.

Through the bond I tracked her: the slow release of tension as the crisis eased, the moments her focus sharpened at something Tara said, the gradual settling of her breath as she began to accept that this was real, that her mother was here, that the worst part of the last decade might finally be ending.

Somewhere in the second hour, the door opened.

Nova stood in the corridor looking at me. She didn't seem surprised to find me exactly where I was—she'd probably felt me through the bond the same way I'd been feeling her, that constant sense of direction that ran underneath conscious thought.

She crossed the space between us. She stood in front of me with her camera still on its strap across her chest, her eyes carrying the particular weight of a woman who'd just gotten back something she'd spent thirteen years refusing to let herself hope for.

She put her hand on my chest.

Over my heart. Her palm flat against my sternum, fingers spread, the contact warm and deliberate.

I covered her hand with mine. Her pulse was steady under my awareness. The bond between us hummed with something I didn't have words for yet—not completion, not quite, but closer to it than we'd been before.

"She's alive," Nova said. Her voice was quiet. Certain.

I didn't speak. I didn't need to. My hand over hers said what I would have said anyway—that I was here, that I wasn't going anywhere, that whatever came next we'd face from exactly this position.

Her eyes searched my face in the corridor light. Reading me the way she read everything—like evidence worth keeping, worth trusting.

"Roan."

Gideon's voice came from the far end of the corridor. I knew before I turned that his face would be carrying something I didn't want to hear—Gideon's expression was controlled by training, but I'd worked with him long enough to read the specific flatness he used when the news was about to change everything.