Page 52 of Guarded By The Alpha

Olen had found it anyway.

"What he's after first isn't you," Gideon said, his voice gone quiet in the way that meant the news was worse than bad. "It's the evidence. Every record that proves the Council's whole bloodline program is real."

I felt Roan's answer before I heard it—the sharp, cold focus of a man already working out how to get there and how to hold it.

"We move," he said into the channel. Two words.

What came back wasn't Caleb.

It was Tara, clipped and controlled in the way she got when she was managing something serious and had no time to soften it.

"We're locked down," she said. "But Roan—Elena saw him on the safe-house camera. She knew him."

A beat of silence.

"She says he isn't Council. She says he's the man who told them where to find her thirteen years ago."

The bond went ice-cold with Roan's rage before the words finished landing.

Thirteen years. My mother's disappearance. The thing that had shaped every wall I'd ever built, every distance I'd ever kept, every piece of evidence I'd spent my career holding at arm's length because getting close to anything meant losing it.

And Garrett Olen had been the one who made it happen.

I reached for Roan's hand without thinking. His fingers closed around mine too tight, his eyes gold-edged and fixed on something I couldn't see.

Through the bond I felt it: the war between the commander working out his response and the wolf who'd just learned that the man threatening his mate's mother was the same man who'd destroyed her life thirteen years ago.

"We move," he said again, and this time his voice was different. Colder. The sound of violence waiting for the word.

I squeezed his hand once. Hard.

"Together," I said.

He looked at me—really looked, the gold easing back as something else moved through his face. Recognition. Understanding what I was telling him without saying it out loud.

We deal with Mast when it's time. We deal with Olen now. Together.

He nodded once.

And we moved.

Chapter 17

A Name in the Dark

NOVA

The news hit me like a blow—not the abstract way information lands on a table, but the chest-compressing way a wound confirms itself.

My mother knew his face.

Tara's voice was still on the comm, steady and even the way she got when handing someone a fact that would level them, and I stood in the east corridor of the safe house feeling the pressure build behind my sternum. Thirteen years. Thirteen years of not knowing if she was alive or dead, of building walls around the empty place because the alternative was drowning in it, and now⁠⁠—

Someone had told them where to look.

Someone who'd been close to the agency for years.

I didn't fall apart. I photographed it instead, the way I'd photographed impossible things since the warehouse. Fixed the fact in place. Noted its size. Kept moving.