Page 9 of Guarded By The Alpha

None of which explained why my wolf went still and easy the moment the words left his mouth.

Not because the pull had faded. Because it had just gotten what it wanted: permission to stay near her. The right to stand between her and every threat that came. My orders and my wolf, for once, pointing the exact same direction—the direction I'd been leaning since I first caught her scent in that warehouse.

Caleb was watching me with the close attention of a man who'd known me six years and was reading something in my stillness I hadn't meant to let him see. He didn't say anything. He almost never does, when watching tells him more than asking would.

"Tara found something in her blood," Gideon said into the quiet. "She's not done yet. But what's there so far is... not normal."

"Not normal how?"

"That's what we're waiting to learn." His eyes moved between me and the photographs. "But the way she reads a room? That's not a thing humans do. She sees the way we smell. Whatever she is, I don't think all of her is ordinary."

The thought planted itself in my chest like a seed I had no idea how to water. What is she? The question had been circling since the warehouse—since the moment my wolf knew her as mate before the rest of me had finished understanding she was real. Human witnesses don't feel the bond. Human women don't make a wolf answer the way mine had answered to her.

But Tara wasn't finished, and I'd learned a long time ago that guessing ahead of the evidence just wastes everyone's time.

The room emptied out. Gideon went back to his screens. Caleb went back to his office and the weight he carried into it. I should have gone to command. I should have read the night's logs. I should have done anything but what I did.

I went back to the corridor outside the medical room.

The locks on her wing needed checking. That was true. I had a real reason to be standing there, and I used it knowing exactly what I was doing, which did nothing at all to make me stop.

I wasn't going to knock. I was going to confirm the door was sound and go back to command. Professional. In control. The man who had never once let what he wanted compromise the safety of someone in his care.

I stood outside that door for about two minutes, doing neither.

Then it opened.

Nova Hale looked out at me with gray-blue eyes that didn't flinch and said, with no greeting, no softness, in the dry, level way I was already learning to know as hers: "I can hear you breathing."

The warmth that went through my chest was instant. I didn't choose it. It answered to nothing I knew how to command.

She was still in the clothes from the warehouse—practical layers, nothing meant to be looked at—and her dark hair was pulled back the way a woman pulls it back when she works with her hands. The camera bag sat on the table behind her, close, angled like something she meant to keep between herself and the door. Not just equipment to her. I could see that.

I looked at her. Really looked, the way my wolf had been demanding since the warehouse and I'd been refusing the whole time. She held my gaze and didn't waver, and all at once I understood why the wolf had chosen her: she wasn't afraid of what she was seeing. She took it in. She studied it. She put it away as a fact instead of a threat.

"I was checking the locks," I said.

"You were standing outside a door."

Not an accusation. Just accurate. It was the most disarming thing anyone had said to me in years, and it cost me nothing, because she wasn't using it as a weapon. She was only telling me what she'd seen, the same way she'd been telling me what she saw since I found her in that basement.

"It's official," I said. "You're under our protection now. I'm the one responsible for you."

A beat. Her eyes moved over my face with that exact, reading quality I was coming to know—the photographer in her, taking down what she saw. The corridor light was hard and unkind, and she looked at me like she was memorizing me for something she'd write down later.

"Okay." Then: "Is that why you've been out here twice?"

I didn't answer that.

I told her Tara would know more in the morning. That her room was safe. That she should sleep. I gave her the short, clean version with six years of practice behind it, and she let me get through all of it without once interrupting.

Then she said: "You'll tell me the truth when Tara's done."

It wasn't a question.

I met her eyes—gray-blue, steady, waiting—and said, "Yes."

It was the first promise I'd ever made her. My wolf took it as something far heavier than the word. A binding. An oath. The start of something I had no language to name.