Page 55 of Guarded By The Alpha

Six years.

I looked at the profile and ran the timeline in my head: six years ago, a protection job. A call that put the rules ahead of instinct. Someone under guard who died. A field commander who rebuilt himself around the belief that discipline was survival, and had carried that one failure as penance ever since.

I looked up at Gideon. "Does Roan know what case this source first turned up on?"

Gideon's face answered before he did. "His first handoff to the Council came two days after the Harrow job went wrong," he said quietly. "The one where the person Roan was guarding died. The case that broke him."

A beat. The corridor light hummed.

"The source didn't cause Harrow to fail. But Harrow failing is what left Roan open to the rule changes that came after—changes that shaped every assignment since. Including the tip that sent him to your warehouse."

It landed with the weight of something that had been true for six years without anyone knowing to look for it.

The thing that broke Roan wasn't an accident.

It was built.

And whoever built it had been inside the agency ever since, watching what they made out of the wreckage.

Chapter 18

When Wolves Choose

ROAN

The operations room smelled like cold coffee and equipment that had been running too long. I'd been working through fallback plans with Maddox for forty minutes—the kind you keep ready for exactly this, when everything shifts faster than you can answer it—and my attention was split in ways I couldn't afford.

Through the bond, I felt Nova two corridors away. Not distressed. Not frightened. Something more careful than either, a held-breath quality I'd learned to read in the twelve days since the warehouse.

She was carrying something.

Maddox said, "—second way out has to account for the wards thinning," and I nodded without hearing it, because Nova had started moving. Toward me. With purpose.

"Run it again with the new numbers," I said. "I need ten minutes."

Maddox gave me the look he used when he'd noticed something he wasn't going to mention, and nodded once.

Nova appeared in the doorway before I reached it.

She stood there with her camera held in both hands, not hanging from its strap—the way she held things when she was working through them. Her gray-blue eyes met mine, and what I read in them hit my chest before I could name it.

She was protecting me from something. I could feel it through the bond—a woman who'd already taken a hit and was deciding how to pass it on.

"Walk with me," she said.

I followed her into the corridor without a word. She moved toward the east wing, where the morning light came through windows that had been reinforced three times since the agency was built, and didn't speak until we reached the small room at the end—the one with the table for four, the one we used when a thing needed privacy.

She closed the door and turned to face me.

"Gideon found the source," she said. "The second informant. The one buried inside the agency's wider circle for six years." She paused, and through the bond I felt her steady herself—not for her own sake. For mine. "His first handoff to the Council came two days after Harrow."

The words landed like a blade sliding between ribs.

Harrow. Six years ago. The job where I'd put the rules ahead of my gut, where I'd followed the plan instead of the animal certainty that something was wrong, where the person I was guarding died because I trusted the picture on paper instead of the part of me that said move now.

The mission that had rebuilt me into something I could live with. The one I'd built everything since around never repeating.

"Who?" I said, and my voice came out even because I'd spent six years making it come out even.