Page 37 of Guarded By The Alpha

His eyes searched my face. Gold at the edges, human at the center. Both of them looking at me like I was the answer to a question he hadn't known he was asking.

"What do you do?"

I smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the one I wore at scenes when the pattern clicked into place and I finally understood what had really happened.

"I document," I said. "I build the record. And then I make sure the right people see it."

He was quiet a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression—the beginning of a different kind of hope.

"Twenty-four hours," he said. "Then we move."

I nodded. "I need to tell my mother about the kill order."

"I'll give you the room."

He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. He stepped back, making space for what I had to do next, and the specific quality of that—the way he made room for me without being asked—was its own kind of declaration.

I walked to the medical wing.

My mother was awake, sitting up against the pillows, and when she saw my face she knew. The way mothers know. The way I'd known, all those years, that something was wrong even when the police told me there were no leads.

"They want me dead," I said. "The Council. They've changed the order from take me back to kill me."

She didn't flinch. Thirteen years had burned that reflex out of her, maybe. Or maybe she'd always been harder than I remembered.

"Then we fight," she said. "What do you need?"

I sat on the edge of her bed and took her hand—fragile, thin, alive—and told her everything.

Chapter 12

The Hunter Outside

NOVA

The safe house came out of nothing—one moment an empty road cutting through dense forest, the next a warded edge pressing against my skin like walking through warm water. Forty minutes outside the city, in a district that didn't show up on any map I'd ever used, and I felt it before I saw it: that faint pressure that meant something built by magic, the kind of thing my body had learned to recognize before my mind caught up.

I read the property the way I read every space I was going to occupy. Exits: front door, back way through the kitchen, windows on the east and west corridors wide enough to climb through if I had to. Sightlines: the main room had a clear view of both approach roads. The kitchen was inexplicably better-equipped than anywhere else in the building, stainless steel and commercial-grade appliances that suggested someone had decided if they were going to hide people here, those people were going to eat well.

My mother moved through the space beside me with the deliberate, careful attention of someone relearning what it meant to be in a room that wasn't a cage.

She touched the walls. Paused at thresholds. Ran her fingers along the edge of a doorframe like she was taking stock of a world that had been kept from her for thirteen years. Her movements were slow, measured, the opposite of everything I remembered from before—before she'd disappeared, before I'd built my whole adult life around the absence of her.

I watched her do it.

I did not photograph the moment.

That was the most significant thing I did all morning.

The team settled into a rhythm around us with the ease of people who'd done this before. Maddox appeared in the kitchen without a word, already pulling things from cabinets like he'd memorized the layout. Jace ran the edges of the property with the economy of a man who trusted his senses over any alarm—I caught glimpses of him through windows, moving at the tree line, his attention turned outward.

And Roan.

Roan moved through the space with that contained authority I'd stopped pretending I didn't feel across my skin. Every room he entered, I knew it. Every time he passed within ten feet of me, something in my chest turned toward him like a compass finding north.

The previous night's corridor admission sat between us unresolved. His voice dropping low: You're mine to protect, Nova. That's not the job talking.

I hadn't stepped back from it.