Page 10 of Guarded By The Alpha

She nodded once, the economy of a woman who'd gotten the one answer she needed, and stepped back inside. The door closed between us.

I stood in the corridor another thirty seconds before I made myself walk to command.

The image was waiting on the main screen when I got there, time-stamped and flagged. Gideon's work—he never sleeps when something's moving, and he'd had every eye the agency owns turned outward since the moment we crossed the wards.

It was sharp despite the dark. A figure caught twenty minutes ago, two blocks out from the ward line. Standing still. Watching the invisible edge of it with the patient attention of someone who knew exactly where that edge was.

Lucian Drake.

He'd found us in under three hours. Those wards are built to stay invisible to anyone without the means to feel for them—they've held against the Council for years. He'd found the edge anyway.

Gideon came up at my shoulder. "Two ways this happens."

"Someone on the inside told him where to look."

"Or there's enough waking up in her blood that the right kind of hunter can already track it."

Both landed with the same weight. One meant we had a leak—someone with the run of this place, feeding the Council from the inside. The other meant Nova Hale was giving off something, a signal Drake had been trained his whole life to follow.

Both were just as dangerous.

One of them was already inside the building.

I looked at the still figure on the screen—Drake's patience, the flat certainty of a man who had never once failed to kill the thing he was sent for—and the wolf that had gone quiet under Caleb's orders began, again, to pace.

Not unease. Readiness.

Whatever was coming, we'd meet it. And Nova Hale would be alive when it was done.

That was the only ending I was willing to accept.ROAN VALE

Chapter 4

Bloodline Awakening

NOVA

Thirty-six hours inside Pack Guard, and I still hadn't slept more than ninety minutes at a stretch.

The room Maddox had set up for me was plain—clean lines, decent light, the anonymity of a space built to be used and not lived in. A single bed against the wall, a small desk by the window, a bathroom that worked. Better than some motels I'd slept in on overnight jobs. Worse than anywhere I'd ever chosen for myself.

I'd spent the night doing the thing I do instead of sleeping. Watching. Cataloguing.

The place had a rhythm, and by now I could read it. The guard changed at four, at noon, at eight—I'd timed the footsteps in the corridor until they made sense. The people here moved like a crew that had worked together long enough that most of what they said to each other wasn't said at all. A lifted chin meant I see you. A hand at the small of a back meant move. Quiet meant everything was fine.

And every single one of them, without seeming to decide to, arranged themselves around Roan Vale the way a room arranges itself around the wall that holds the weight.

I'd stood in my doorway watching it for two hours the night before. The way conversations changed pitch when he came down the hall. The way bodies angled toward him even when eyes stayed somewhere else. The way the whole hum of the place tuned itself to him, iron filings finding the magnet.

Just habit, I told myself. Just watching, the way I always watch.

It was not just watching, and the fact that I needed to call it that should have told me something.

The little coffee maker in my room made something that was technically liquid and theoretically coffee. I was pouring my second cup when two sharp knocks hit the door, and it opened before I'd answered.

Tara Quinn came in carrying two real cups from somewhere better than my sad burner, a folder under her arm, her face telling me a conversation was about to happen whether I was ready or not.

"You look like you've been up since four," she said, setting one of the cups in front of me.