Page 12 of Guarded By The Alpha

The corridor outside my window looked straight down into the meeting room two floors below. I'd found that angle the night before, on one of my not-sleeping stretches. Good for watching. Good for knowing who met whom at odd hours.

At eight, Roan and Caleb Thorne walked into that room together.

I told myself I wanted more coffee. The way to the bathroom happened to pass the window. The window happened to look down through the room's glass wall.

Caleb's body was controlled but heavy—the weight of a man delivering news that was going to cost somebody something. His hands moved once, twice, making a point I couldn't hear through two panes of glass. His jaw was set in the way I'd already learned meant the words were hard to say.

Roan's face showed nothing.

But his hands.

His hands went still in that particular way I'd marked as the thing he does when he's taking something in. Not braced, not ready—deeper than that. The stillness of a man hearing something that changes the math he'd already done.

He turned his head.

I was in shadow. The angle was wrong. There was no way he should have found me through a reflection and a glass wall and the dark of an unlit corridor.

His eyes landed on my face and held for three full seconds.

My heart did something I chose not to name.

Then he turned back to Caleb, and I walked to the bathroom like that had been where I was going all along.

The talk came an hour later.

Roan gave it himself, filling my doorway with the same spare economy he brought to everything. No extra words, no soft start.

"They don't want you dead. They want you back. Drake isn't here to silence a witness. He's here to collect something they think belongs to them."

"Collect." I let the word sit between us. "You're telling me the Council wants me alive."

"Caged. Controlled. Useful." His jaw tightened. "Caleb's tightened things up. You stay inside. No going out. No contact with anyone until we know more."

I crossed my arms. "You're telling me I'm a prisoner."

"I'm telling you the walls are what's keeping you alive."

"That's not the same answer."

He met my eyes and didn't look away. "No. It isn't."

He didn't pretend it was. He didn't try to walk me gently around the ugly part of it.

I didn't push it further—not because I agreed, but because the honesty hit harder than a fight would have. I needed a second to figure out what to do with a man who wouldn't handle me.

"I want everything you have on how they take people," I said instead. "Not the simple version. The real thing."

A beat of quiet.

"Tara will bring it within the hour."

He left.

It came at noon—a folder thick enough to need two hands and a laptop loaded with everything the agency had pried loose about the Council. I read for two hours straight, taking notes as I went, turning grief into evidence because evidence was the only thing I'd ever known how to trust.

The way the Council took people was older and more careful than I'd let myself imagine. They didn't grab at random. They watched. They weighed. They waited for the right moment—the blood beginning to stir, the person alone enough, a window where someone could vanish without much noise.

The folder laid out how they did it. How they sorted who they took. How they held them after.