Page 73 of Guarded By The Alpha

"I've had evidence challenged before," she said. Her voice was steady in the way that cost her nothing, because it was simply who she was. "Crime scene depositions. Department inquiries. The answer to a challenge is more evidence, delivered more precisely."

Caleb looked at her the way he looked at people he was reassessing.

"You're the evidence they failed to control," he said. "That's why this works. That's also why it costs."

She didn't look at me when she answered. She looked at Caleb with the gray-blue directness that had never once flinched from what any of us were, and she said: "I know what it costs. I've been documenting their crime scene for eleven days. That's what I do."

The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was the specific weight of a woman who'd made her decision and a room reorganizing around it.

I stood from my chair. The motion wasn't conscious—it was the body moving before the mind signed off, the same instinct that had been turning me toward her since the warehouse. I crossed the distance between us and stopped close enough to feel the warmth of her, but I didn't touch her. I was holding the line she'd set.

"What do you need?" I asked.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were steady, but there was something underneath—not fear, not uncertainty, but the specific weight of a woman about to walk into something significant.

"Thirty-six hours to prepare," she said. "Gideon's full archive. Tara's bloodline records. And you."

"You have all of it."

"I know." She held my gaze. "That's not the same as asking."

I understood what she was telling me. The bond between us was warm and intact, but she was still holding the printout in her pocket, still working through something, and she was asking instead of assuming, because that was what repair looked like when it was real.

"You have me," I said. The words came out lower than I meant them, rougher, carrying weight I hadn't meant to put on them. "That's not up for negotiation. That's not conditional on anything else."

Her expression shifted—not softening, more like arriving, the face of a woman who'd been in motion a long time and was letting something land.

Caleb cleared his throat from the doorway. "I'll have Gideon start building the testimony by 0700. Tara will need to put together the bloodline analysis." He looked between us with the expression of a man who'd seen enough to understand what he was looking at. "Thirty-six hours. I'd suggest you use them."

He left the tablet on the table and walked out, closing the door behind him with the quiet efficiency of someone who knew when to give people room.

Nova looked at the tablet. Then she looked at me.

"I'm going to take them apart," she said.

It wasn't a question. It wasn't bravado. It was a woman stating a fact about what she could do, and my wolf recognized the truth of it the same way it had recognized everything about her since the moment we met.

"I know," I said.

She reached up and put her hand on my chest—over my heart, the same gesture she'd used in the corridor outside the medical bay, the same gesture that meant something neither of us had words for yet.

"Stay," she said.

I covered her hand with mine. Her fingers were cool against my palm, and through the bond I could feel her—steady, certain, the specific quality of a woman who'd made her decision and was asking me to be part of it.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said.

She nodded once. Then she turned toward the tablet, toward the work, toward the next thirty-six hours that would decide whether the Council's network came down or got managed into something that would haunt us for years.

But her hand stayed in mine for three more seconds before she let go.

That was what repair looked like when it was real. Not an ending. A continuation.

I stayed.

Chapter 24

What They Made of Her