Page 49 of Guarded By The Alpha

I read it over Nova's shoulder, the bond sharp and present between us, her crime scene instincts already working the evidence before her mind caught up.

They'd identified the contingency.

The Council's second operative had been woven into the city's supernatural underpinnings for forty-eight hours—not waiting outside our edge but planted inside the network we leaned on. Communication relays. Warded transit routes. Supply lines the agency had been treating as solid ground.

This one wasn't another cleaner.

The order was to wake a sleeper—someone already inside Nova's own circle, someone with access to her life from before the warehouse, someone the Council had set in place long before Drake ever moved.

The aim wasn't to kill Nova.

It was to destroy the Pack Guard Agency itself: its structure, the identities of its people, the ones it protected, and every bloodline record it held.

Gideon's last line stopped the room cold.

The early read was that the trigger wasn't the order from four hours ago. The trigger was the claiming bite. Someone inside Nova's circle had been watching for exactly this—the bond completing, the mark, the moment the agency's field commander became personally compromised.

The sleeper woke the moment it happened.

Nova's hand found mine in the changing light. The bond between us pulsed with her working it through—not fear, not panic, but the specific compressed attention of a woman who'd just been handed evidence and was already running it.

"They built it around us," she said.

"Yes."

"The bond. The mark. They planned for it."

"Yes."

She was quiet a moment. Through the connection, I felt her turning over what it meant—the scope of the Council's planning, the specific shape of a trap that had used my wolf's knowing of her as one of its moving parts.

"They planned for what you'd feel," she said finally. "They didn't plan for what I'd do about it."

I looked at her. Gray-blue eyes in the dawn light, the mark silver at her shoulder, her jaw set with the specific determination I'd been watching build in her for ten days.

"No," I said. "They didn't."

She squeezed my hand once. The bond carried everything between us—the threat they'd woken, the trap they'd built, and underneath all of it, the certainty neither of us was willing to give up.

"Then we meet it," she said. "Together."

Chapter 16

The Edge of the Perimeter

NOVA

The bond woke me before the alert did.

I was already sitting up in the narrow safe-house bed when Gideon's signal cut through the pre-dawn quiet, my chest tight with something that wasn't mine—Roan's focus, sharp and cold, bleeding through the connection like ice water. Three rooms away and I could feel his mind go hard and narrow, the way it did when a threat shoved everything softer aside.

I pulled on clothes without thinking. Jeans, one of Maddox's spare flannels I'd claimed without asking, boots I'd learned to keep within reach. The mark on my shoulder ached with a low, warm pulse that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with knowing where he was. Roan was moving toward the east room. I could feel the direction of him like a compass needle settling north.

Camera bag. I grabbed it before I registered the impulse—habit older than any of this, the photographer's reflex to document whatever was coming.

The corridor was already sharp with tension when I stepped into it. The emergency lights hadn't tripped, which meant no one had breached the walls. This was something else. Something Gideon had pulled off a screen rather than off a sensor.

Roan stood at the window in the main corridor, his back to me, and he didn't turn when I came up because he didn't need to. He knew exactly where I was. The bond made sure of it.