Page 80 of Guarded By The Alpha

Roan walked at my other shoulder. Not in front of me. Not behind me. Beside me.

I was aware, with the specific clarity of someone who'd been cataloguing details for eleven days, that he'd never held this position with anyone else. Not a guard's posture. Not a commander's. The posture of a man who was exactly where he meant to be.

The corridor held the quiet of something finished. We walked through it together, and that was its own kind of declaration.

His quarters that evening were quiet in a way I hadn't expected. The room that was specifically his—not the safe house, not the briefing room—where I'd never been, where he took me because this was the thing he was choosing rather than the duty he was carrying out.

I closed the door behind me and crossed the room and put both hands on his face.

There was no job in progress. No urgency except the one that was simply us.

He looked at me the way he'd been looking at me since the sixth night in the safe house—like I was the answer to a question he'd spent six years not knowing he was asking—and let himself stop holding back.

"Nova," he said, low.

I pulled him down to me.

His hands found my waist, my hips, the curve of my back. Unhurried but deliberate. The careful removal of everything between us—my jacket, his shirt, the distance I'd kept like furniture between myself and what I wanted.

I traced the scar along his forearm that he'd finally, these past days, begun to explain. The story of the job that had cost him more than the wound. The story of a man who'd learned to carry everything alone because he'd never expected anyone to choose him back.

"Mine," I said against his jaw.

He went still.

I said it again. "Mine."

The sound he made wasn't human. Something between surrender and relief and a hunger that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with belonging.

He lifted me and I wrapped around him—legs, arms, the full weight of choosing this—and we moved to the bed that was his and I pulled him down over me.

"I need you," he said. The only time he'd say it like this, because he wasn't a man who wasted words.

I went still beneath him.

"I know," I said.

I said it again, softer, my mouth against his throat where I could feel his pulse racing.

"I know."

He answered me with everything he had.

His hands at my marked shoulder first—gentle, reverent—the silver warm and responsive under his palm. Then mapping me with a thoroughness that witnessed rather than took. My skin heated everywhere he touched. My breath caught when his mouth found the mark, when his teeth grazed the silver edge of it.

I arched into him. My nails found his back, his shoulders, the solid muscle of a man built to protect who was finally learning to be protected in return.

He came into me with a slowness that was its own kind of declaration. Not restraint. Certainty.

The bond blazed between us. I could feel the edges of him through it—his relief and his certainty and the thing underneath both that was beginning to know it had somewhere to put down.

"Yours," I said.

He moved, and I moved with him, and there was nothing between us anymore. No documentation distance. No glass wall between me and the things I might lose. Just this: his weight over me, his hands in my hair, his breath ragged against my throat.

"And you're mine," he said.

The words landed like something permanent. Something I was no longer bracing against.