Page 50 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Briefing," he said, lower than it should have been. "Now."

I nodded, though he couldn't see it, and followed him.

The team was already gathering—Gideon at his screens with his face locked into the flatness he wore when the news was worse than bad, Caleb filling the secure display from the agency with the voice of a man who hadn't slept and was running on something colder than coffee. Jace and Maddox checked in over the comm from the perimeter with the quiet regularity of people who'd set themselves in place before anyone had to ask.

I sat at the table.

Not near the door. Not somewhere I could slip out if it turned hard. I put myself at the table with my camera bag in my lap and my hands flat on the surface, and I watched Roan register the choice in the slight shift of his shoulders before he took the head of the room.

Gideon didn't bother with a lead-in.

"The thing we caught last night isn't Drake," he said, putting it up on the main screen. "It's someone planted. Buried inside the system that sends crime scene photographers out to their jobs."

The words landed in my chest like a fist.

Crime scene photographers. The system I'd worked inside for seven years without once asking who decided where I went and when.

"They've had that access for at least eight months," Gideon went on, in the careful, even voice he used when he wished he didn't have to say a thing. "The warehouse wasn't where their access started. It's where they finally used it."

Eight months.

I did the math without meaning to. Eight months of someone sitting in my working life. Watching my calendar. Learning my patterns. Waiting for the moment that would make me useful. And then putting me exactly where they needed me.

"Who decides where the photographers go?" I asked, and my voice came out steadier than I felt.

Gideon pulled the chart up without a word. He'd had it ready—I could tell from the speed of it. He'd known I'd ask.

Three names. A committee. Eight years in the chair.

I looked at the names and went very still.

Garrett Olen. Committee chair. The name I'd seen on assignment confirmations for three years without ever really seeing it, because that was the whole point of a name like that—it was supposed to be invisible. Background noise. The kind of presence that doesn't register precisely because it's built not to.

"Olen," I said quietly, and something in my chest went cold.

Gideon was already pulling the footage before I finished. Jace's voice came over the comm from the north, low and flat: "Name's familiar. I ran a check on the people around you two days ago. Olen came up clean."

"Clean records get built," Gideon said, and didn't look up.

It took forty minutes to be sure.

Forty minutes of time stamps and drop sites and the shapes of who'd talked to whom, and all of it pointed the same way with a clarity that made my own instincts go quiet and watchful. This wasn't a guess. This was on paper.

Olen had been feeding the Council for years.

The chart blurred a little at the edge of my vision, and I realized my hands had gone tight on the table. Not fear, exactly. Something colder. The focused anger of a woman who'd just learned that someone had been sitting in her life like a spider in a web—watching, waiting, patient.

Roan passed the confirmation to Caleb, and Caleb's answer came back with the flatness that meant it had just gotten worse.

"Olen's handler isn't Drake." Caleb's voice came across like gravel. "It's Severin Mast. Senior enough to give the order to wipe out an agency."

I watched Roan take that in. His face didn't change—it never did—but I felt something shift through the bond. A reset. The understanding that the job he'd thought he was running was a small piece of something older and larger and far more dangerous.

"The Council's wanted us gone since before Nova's blood ever stirred," Caleb went on. "Mast has been building toward this for years. She was never the cause. She's the trigger."

The trigger.

I let the word settle and turned it over the way I'd turn over evidence. Not the cause. The mechanism. The thing that made all the other pieces move.