Page 11 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Three-thirty."

"Overachiever." She pulled out the chair across from me and sat, opening the folder with the matter-of-fact ease I was learning was just how she moved through the world. "Your second set of results came back."

I wrapped my hands around the real coffee—hot, properly made—and waited. Whatever was in that folder had brought her to my door at seven in the morning instead of a decent hour. I'd sat through enough bad-news conversations to know one being set up.

Tara didn't soften it.

"There's something old in your mother's line. Asleep, but there. Older than the Council's records go back. Wolf-adjacent—close to whatever wolves came from, but not wolf itself." She turned a page and pointed to a chart I couldn't read from where I sat. "It hasn't shown up in a generation. And from everything in your blood, someone made very sure it wouldn't."

I took that in the way I take everything in—sorting it, filing it, putting it somewhere I could come back to once I had more to set it against.

"Made sure," I repeated. "So somebody was keeping it asleep on purpose."

"On purpose." She looked up at me with the same straight, unhedged directness she'd used in the medical room. No cushion in front of it. Just facts, handed to a person she'd decided could take them. "It's in the body, not in any spell. It came down through your mother. Through her mother before her."

My mother.

I put that behind glass. I was aware I was putting it behind glass. I noted that too, and set it down.

"What does it mean if it wakes up? Am I going to start growing fur?"

Her mouth twitched—not quite a smile, close to one. "No. Wolf-adjacent isn't wolf. Think of it more like—pitch. Your blood makes you able to hear things most people can't. You felt the ward when no ordinary person should have. The way you stay calm when everything's on fire—that's not just nerve, it's built into you. You handle this kind of fear differently than the rest of us do."

"Which is why I didn't run screaming out of that warehouse."

"Which is why you took pictures instead of running, yes. Your gut's tuned for a world you didn't know was real until two days ago." She closed the folder. "And it's waking up. Being near this much of it—near wolves, near their magic—speeds that up."

Being near wolves.

Being near Roan.

I didn't ask that one either. I set it down next to the one about my mother and kept moving.

"What do I need to know about it speeding up? Is it dangerous?"

"Not on its own. You seem steady. It's coming up slow, not all at once." She picked up her coffee and watched me over the rim. "But the Council pays attention to blood like yours. Something that's been asleep for a generation suddenly stirring is exactly what they watch for. Which means they likely knew about you before the warehouse. They were probably already watching."

The size of what I'd walked into kept growing while I sat there, the edges pushing out past where I'd thought they were.

"The warehouse wasn't an accident," I said slowly, the pieces sliding into a different shape. "They knew I'd be there. They knew what was in me."

"That's what Gideon thinks." She set down her cup and stood, leaving the folder on the table. "Thorne wants to talk to you in an hour. I wanted you to hear the medical part from me first."

After she left, I sat with the folder a long time.

The charts meant nothing to me—a vocabulary from a world I hadn't known existed. But the summary at the front was plain enough. Something asleep in the blood: confirmed. Waking up: yes. Danger: higher than it was yesterday.

I opened my laptop and started a timeline in a blank document.

What I knew: my mother had vanished thirteen years ago. No body, no note, no trail the police could follow. I'd been sixteen—old enough to understand that people sometimes disappear, young enough to still believe disappearing was supposed to come with a reason.

What the Council apparently knew: blood like mine was worth something. They watched it. They tracked it. They took it.

I typed the dates in side-by-side columns—my mother gone, the Council's program of taking people like me, the pattern of the thing in my blood and what suppresses it.

I did not type the sentence that connected them.

I left the middle of the page empty and wrote everything around it, which was as close to the truth as I could make myself get.