Page 34 of Guarded By The Alpha

He stopped at a careful distance. His eyes went to Nova's hand still pressed to my chest, to my hand over it, to the way we were standing that said more than any report could.

"The Council registered the break-in seventeen minutes ago," he said.

Nova's fingers tightened against my sternum. I felt the spike in her heart through the bond before it reached her pulse.

"The order on her has changed," Gideon went on. He was looking at Nova now, not me, because what came next was for her. "Drake's been given something new. The Council's decided that a bloodline they can't control, loose, is more dangerous than one they've lost."

He paused. His voice didn't change, but I heard what it cost him to say it.

"The new order is to kill you. They'd rather you were dead than let your blood come into its own outside their hold."

The bond between us didn't dim. Nova's hand on my chest didn't pull away. But my hand over hers tightened—one involuntary press of my fingers—and when she looked up at my face, my eyes had already gone gold.

Chapter 11

Wards and Warnings

NOVA

The word elimination hung in the corridor like smoke from a gunshot.

I watched Roan take it in—watched the gold flood his eyes in a surge that had nothing to do with the lighting and everything to do with what his wolf had just heard. His hand was still over mine on his chest, and beneath my palm I felt his heartbeat spike once, hard, before he forced it steady through what looked like sheer will.

The control cost him. I could see it in the way his jaw locked, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables under strain. His wolf wanted to do something, and the human side of him was holding it back with both hands.

"Shut the channel down," he said to Gideon, and his voice was completely level. Too level. The kind of level that only happened when someone was working very hard to keep something else from coming through. "Pull Jace and Maddox to the inner corridor. I want Caleb on a secure line in twenty minutes."

Gideon was already moving, tablet in hand, fingers flying. He didn't ask questions. He didn't need to.

Roan let go of my hand and stepped back one measured pace, making exactly the distance that would let him think clearly. I knew the move—I'd used versions of it at scenes, when the evidence started forming a picture I didn't want to see. The distance you put between yourself and something that's about to ask hard things of you.

His eyes had come back to near-normal by the time he looked at me directly. Near-normal. The gold was still there at the edges, a thin ring of something that wasn't quite human and wasn't trying to hide anymore.

I matched him. That was what I did—read the room, weigh the evidence, answer what was actually happening instead of what I wished was.

"How long has Drake been moving?"

Gideon answered without looking up. "The order went out four hours ago. He's already on the move."

Four hours. Drake had been moving while I was in the medical bay with my mother, holding her hand and cataloguing the new lines around her eyes, the way her fingers felt fragile in mine after thirteen years. Four hours while I was learning she was alive and real and here, and the Council had already decided I was worth more to them dead than awake.

I filed it away. Took it the way I take a scene—not by feeling all of it at once, but by setting down the facts and letting the weight of them land later, when there was time.

Roan called the closed briefing within five minutes.

The room filled fast: Caleb on the secure screen, his scarred face giving nothing away; Gideon at his station with the feeds spread across several displays; Jace and Maddox in from their posts within sixty seconds. Tara slipped in last, medical tablet in hand, and took a spot near the door like she was already working out how she'd get anyone out who needed it.

I was at the table. Not in the seat they'd put me in during the first briefings—the civilian chair, the one for the person being protected. Roan had pulled out the chair beside his own and I'd taken it without comment, and no one else had commented either.

That meant something. I wasn't sure what yet, but I was noting it.

"The order's changed to kill," Roan said, his voice carrying the flat authority of a man who'd delivered worse news in worse places and lived through it. "Drake's repositioning. Nova's blood is waking faster than the Council expected." He looked at each of them in turn—Jace, Maddox, Gideon, Tara, then back to Caleb. "Their choice to kill instead of take her back tells us that. Being close to wolves is speeding up what's in her blood, faster than they can manage."

Faster than they can manage. I turned that over. The Council had run the numbers on me—on my blood, on what I might become, on the danger I might be if I came into it outside their hold. They'd decided it had slipped too far to control.

I'd been evidence my whole career. I'd never been a number before.

Caleb's voice came through the line, even and unsurprised. "When the threat is this high, we move the protected person to an offsite house. Warded, rotating, off the grid Drake would expect." A pause. "There's one house on the books with wards strong enough to stand against what Drake can do."