Page 61 of Guarded By The Alpha

The Council's forty-eight-hour window had closed.

My mother was in the medical wing, learning to breathe again by degrees.

I photographed none of it because I was too busy being inside it.

Roan came to the table when the room had emptied. He didn't sit beside me—he sat across from me, the same place Caleb had taken when he'd explained what he needed. I understood the choice in it: he was looking at me, not managing me, not setting himself up as my protection in this moment.

Just looking.

Through the bond, I felt what he was holding. The pride that ran deeper than satisfaction. The relief that had a physical quality to it, like tension finally leaving muscles held too long. The certainty that had been the bedrock of him since the night I reached for his hand in the dark.

I met his eyes.

"You documented their crime scene," he said. His voice was low and carried the weight of a man who'd just watched someone he loved do something that would matter beyond both of them.

"That's what I do," I said.

His mouth did the thing it almost never did. It curved—not the contained, barely-there compression I'd catalogued over eleven days, but something real and unhurried and aimed entirely at me. The expression of a man who'd stopped holding himself at arm's length from the thing that mattered most.

I reached across the spread of evidence and covered his hand with mine.

He turned his palm up and held it.

The moment lasted three seconds before Maddox appeared in the doorway.

I read his face before he spoke. I'd learned to read Maddox the way you learn to read people who say most of what they mean through action—the small shifts that meant something was wrong, the contained precision that meant urgency without panic.

What I saw on his face now was the equivalent of a shouted alarm on anyone else.

Roan had already gone still the way he went still before violence.

"Drake's out," Maddox said. "Off the transport. Twenty minutes ago. He's not in custody."

The warmth in my chest didn't leave. The bond held, Roan's hand tightening around mine.

But under it, cold and certain as evidence, came the knowledge that Lucian Drake was the one person in the Council's network who knew everything I'd just put down on paper. Who knew what I carried. Who'd shown, twice now, that he was patient and professional and not interested in me dead when dead was wasteful.

Drake didn't fail. He finished, whatever it took.

I looked at Roan.

His eyes had gone gold.

Chapter 20

What Captivity Documents

NOVA

The grab took three minutes and forty seconds.

I know because I counted. Not from fear — I was past fear before thirty — but because counting was something I could control, and right now control was the only tool I had.

I'd been in the east corridor, moving between the archive and my room with Gideon's second file under my arm. Eleven-forty PM. The team was on its late rotations. A ninety-second gap in coverage that shouldn't have existed.

Olen had built it. Drake used it.

He came from behind the third maintenance panel — the seam in the wards that predated the last upgrade, the one in the original building plans Olen had pulled and no one had thought to check. He threaded the single gap in the building's coverage with the precision of a man who'd stripped the drama out of this kind of work a long time ago. Not aggressive. Not hurried. The particular efficiency of someone for whom this was just the next thing on a list.