Page 47 of Guarded By The Alpha

The bond woke me at 0247, sharp and pointed, before I understood what had pulled me out of the thin rest I'd been running on for six days. Nova. Moving through the safe house in the dark I'd memorized, her presence a warm pressure in my chest that my wolf tracked without my permission.

I was already at the east corridor desk when she found me. Files spread across the surface, threat notes I'd been over for the third time because sleep wasn't coming and the alternative was standing outside her door again, which I'd done five of the past six nights and couldn't keep calling a patrol.

She closed the door behind her.

I looked up. She stood in the doorway in one of Maddox's spare flannels over her sleep clothes, hair loose, feet bare on the cold floor. The bond between us pulsed once—recognition, certainty—and my wolf went very, very still in the way it went still when something important was about to happen.

"I need to tell you something," she said, crossing the room until she stood right in front of me, "and I need you to hear it as me saying it. Not as the bloodline or the bond or whatever's running between us underneath."

I set down the notes. Pushed the chair back. Gave her my full attention, because anything less would be an insult to whatever she was about to say.

"The warehouse was a setup," she said. "My mother was taken. Drake's been hunting me for weeks. Every single thing I thought I could control has turned out to be someone else's operation."

I knew all of this. I'd been carrying the weight of it for days—the specific burden of a man who'd walked the person in his care into a trap he hadn't seen coming.

"And I have never been less afraid in my life than I am right now." Her voice was steady. Her eyes held mine without flinching. "With you. In this."

The gold came into the edges of my sight. Not a threat response. Not the wolf breaking loose. Something else entirely—something I'd been watching build in her since the corridor outside the medical bay and hadn't had words for until this exact moment.

She told me the rest without dodging any of it: seven years of keeping everything at arm's length. The choice she'd been building toward since the night I sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and said nothing and stayed. The plain fact that I was the first thing she'd wanted to keep since her mother disappeared, and she was done standing behind glass and photographing it.

I stood. Said her name the way I only said it when it meant everything else. "Nova."

"I know what I'm choosing," she said, before I could finish. "Your wolf doesn't have a middle setting. Once this is⁠—"

"I know what I'm choosing."

The claiming bite was both inevitable and entirely chosen.

I was careful. She was certain. My mouth found the place at her shoulder that had been calling to me since the warehouse—the spot my wolf had marked before my mind caught up—and when my teeth broke skin, the pain and pleasure of it sent her arching against me with a sound that bypassed every defense she'd ever built.

The bond completed.

Not the straining, half-formed thing it had been for ten days. This was a circuit closing, a connection finishing, her presence flooding my chest with the specific quality of something that had been reaching toward this moment and had finally arrived home.

The mark settled into silver at her shoulder. She traced it with her fingertips, and I shuddered through the bond—felt her feel me shudder, the loop of sensation and feeling running between us now with nothing to interrupt it.

Through the finished connection, I felt what she'd been carrying: the terror of her mother's disappearance, the years of building walls around anything that might matter, the deep disorientation of a woman who'd built her whole life around evidence and distance finding something that demanded she close the gap.

She put her hand flat on my chest. "I can feel that."

My emotion pressing against hers through the bond. Relief so deep it knocked me off balance. And underneath it, something that hadn't had a name before now.

"I know," I said. Like a man who'd been waiting to be known and couldn't have asked for it.

What followed was not urgent.

I took off her borrowed flannel with the attention of a man who'd been learning her for ten days and meant to use everything he knew. She let me. Her hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head, and the contact of skin against skin sent the bond resonating between us like a struck chord.

I touched the mark first—my palm at her shoulder, gentle and reverent in a way that was entirely different from how I touched everything else. The silver was warm under my hand, faintly bright in the dark of the corridor. She shivered, and I felt the shiver through the bond before I felt it against my skin.

Then I mapped her.

Her jaw. Her throat. The line of her collarbone and the curve of her breast and the soft plane of her stomach. I learned her thoroughly, the possession of a man who'd been holding himself at a distance for ten days and was done pretending that distance served anyone.

She said "yours" against my jaw, and I went still.

She said "mine," and I made a sound I'd never made for anyone—wrecked and certain, something that had no place in human speech and belonged entirely to the wolf.