Page 59 of Guarded By The Alpha

The Retrieval Order

NOVA

The weight of Caleb's words still hung in the air when I sat down at the main table. The ten o'clock summons had pulled me from the medical corridor where Roan and I had been working through what we'd found, and now the whole picture was spreading across the table in front of me like evidence at a scene.

Caleb Thorne didn't soften anything. I was starting to understand that was his version of respect.

"The Council's full session meets in forty-eight hours," he said, his scarred face catching the overhead light as he leaned forward. "There are bodies that oversee the Council—that have authority over its bloodline program—but they've never had enough proof to move. The Council's lived in the gray for decades. Known enough to be talked about, hidden enough to be untouchable."

I took it in the way I take in every scene: edges first, then inward. "And you're saying we have the proof now."

"I'm saying you have it." Caleb's gaze was direct, weighing. "What you carry in your memory—everything you saw while they held you at Drake's site, plus Gideon's footage, the bloodline records Tara's put together, and what Drake gave up under questioning—is the first complete picture anyone's ever assembled of how the Council operates."

Through the bond, I felt Roan at the edge of the room. He'd put himself near the door, not at the table—present but not running it. The steady warmth of his attention grounded me without asking anything. I used it the way I use a fixed point when I'm framing a hard shot.

"What does taking part cost?" I asked.

Caleb's face didn't change, but something in his posture shifted. "Eighteen hours of work under pressure. Putting your memory down in a form the oversight bodies can use. And being named, formally, as the spine of a case against one of the most powerful organizations there is."

"And what does it change?"

"Everything." He said it simply. "If the oversight bodies get a complete case before the Council convenes, the Council can't act on its agenda. They can't vote to tear down the agency while they're being reviewed for their own crimes."

I sat with that a moment. The bond pulsed warm and steady, Roan's presence like a wall at my back even though he hadn't moved.

"Three questions," I said. "When's the deadline to submit?"

"Fourteen hours before the Council meets. That gives us thirty-four from now."

"How secure is the channel Gideon's sending it through?"

"Locked down three ways over, routed through three separate jurisdictions. Gideon's been building that channel for three years." Caleb paused. "He's never had anything worth sending through it."

"And my mother, in the medical wing—is she shielded from anything of the Council's that's still watching?"

Caleb's gaze held mine. "Fully warded. Tara's been running cover since Elena got here. The Council doesn't have eyes inside this building."

I reached for my kit—the same one I'd carried to every scene for seven years, the one that had been with me in that warehouse, that had come through everything since. I set it on the table.

"I need a table and enough time," I said. "I've been doing this since the warehouse."

The next eighteen hours became the most focused work of my life.

I'd built cases before. Documented aftermath, catalogued ruin, assembled the fragments of terrible things into something a prosecutor could use and a jury could follow. But this was different. This was building the record of a crime that had been running for decades, buried under layers of bureaucracy and careful erasing.

I worked the way I work every scene: steadily, without rushing, starting from the outermost facts and moving inward toward the detail that changes everything.

Tara sat across from me for the first six hours, supplying the bloodline analysis that gave my record its specifics. She translated the markers she'd found in my blood and matched them against the Council's known files.

"This pattern here," she said, pointing to a cluster on her screen. "What was keeping your blood asleep matches the signature of how the Council holds people. Your mother would have carried the same markers while they had her."

"So the bloodwork backs up the rest."

"More than that." Tara's voice was calm, precise—the easy partnership we'd built in the medical bay running at full strength now. "It proves their methods are standardized. Every bloodline they've handled carries the same signature. Your mother. You. Everyone else."

I wrote that connection down and moved to the next piece.

Gideon worked the archive at my right, matching my memory against his footage in real time, flagging confirmations and filling gaps. He'd been running that archive for years—I could see it in the way he moved through it, the automatic ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was.