Page 35 of Guarded By The Alpha

"One," Gideon confirmed, pulling it up on his display.

"Which means Nova, her mother, and the core team live inside it together until the threat's gone," Caleb went on. "Roan, you're running it. Who do you want on her directly?"

The question hung for exactly two seconds.

"I'll take it myself," Roan said.

I caught the shift in Caleb's face—the small adjustment that meant Roan had just stepped outside what was expected. A man running the whole operation didn't tie himself to one person. It split his focus. It made gaps. It was the kind of call that broke the discipline he lived by.

Roan didn't explain. Caleb didn't push.

Jace, in the doorway with his arms crossed, looked from Roan to me and back. His face gave away exactly nothing, which was somehow louder than a reaction.

Tara's tablet clicked against the table as she set it down. "Elena's stable but needs watching during the move. I'll handle her myself."

I nodded. My mother, still mending in the medical wing, didn't know about this yet. She didn't know that the people who'd held her for thirteen years had just signed off on her daughter's death. I'd have to tell her. Later. When there was time to do it in a way that didn't break something we'd barely begun to rebuild.

"How long before Drake reaches us?" I asked.

Gideon checked his feeds. "Forty-eight hours at his pace. Less if he pushes."

"Then we move in twenty-four. Not forty-eight."

The room went quiet.

I could feel them all looking at me—Jace's unreadable weighing, Maddox's careful stillness, Gideon working it through, Tara's medical concern. And Roan. Roan was looking at me with something that wasn't surprise and wasn't assessment. Something closer to recognition.

"She's right," he said, and moved the timeline up without argument. "Twenty-four hours. Jace, start prepping the house. Maddox, the transport. Gideon, I want the full picture on what Drake's working with before we move."

Jace came off the doorframe and walked out without a word. That was as close to agreement as Jace got, I was learning. Silent meant he'd already started running the problem in his head.

The briefing rolled into the logistics—handoffs, routing, ward specs. I listened and noted, building the picture in my head the way I build an evidence record: thoroughly, no gap left for someone to use later.

Caleb signed off with orders to keep him updated every hour. The team scattered to their tasks with the ease of people who'd done this before, who knew exactly what a kill order looked like when it landed.

I stayed at the table.

Roan stayed with me.

The quiet that fell between us was different from the working quiet of the briefing. This was the quiet of two people who had something to say and weren't sure how to start.

"You're carrying something," I said. "Have been since Gideon walked in with the intercept."

His jaw tightened. "The threat⁠—"

"Not the threat." I turned in my chair to face him directly. "Something else. Something you're not putting on the table."

He was quiet a moment. Then: "The warehouse might have been a setup. All of it."

I waited.

"If the Council put you at that scene on purpose," he went on, his voice dropping to something rawer, "if they set you in my path deliberately—if they understand what happens to something sleeping in the blood when it gets close to a strong wolf⁠—"

"They might have planned for the bond," I finished.

His eyes held mine. The gold was back at the edges, but it wasn't a threat. It was the specific weight of a man who'd just admitted to himself that everything he thought he'd chosen might have been handed to him by people who wanted to use it.

"Did they want me close to you specifically?" I asked. "Not just to find the agency, but to push my blood along faster? To set off something they could use?"