Page 22 of Guarded By The Alpha

The answer came back at once, Gideon already three steps ahead. "On it. Started the second the name came through last night."

He let go of the comm. His attention came back to me with its full weight.

"You're doing that before Caleb tells you to," I said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He held my gaze. No deflection, no professional distance, just the steadiness of a man who'd decided to give me the truth instead of the procedure.

"Because it matters."

The plainness of it hit harder than any long answer could have. Three words, no hedging, landing in a chest that had spent thirteen years building walls around the belief that nothing would ever matter enough to fight for.

I looked back at the file. My jaw was tight enough to ache.

"They walked me into this," I said. "The warehouse. The assignment. None of it was an accident, was it."

"No." He didn't soften it. "Their messages talk about putting you somewhere on purpose. They set you in that warehouse to see if your blood would wake up."

I let it land. Every choice I thought I'd made had been made for me, by people who treated bloodlines as stock and mothers as leverage.

"The briefing," I said. "When does Caleb pull the team together?"

"Seven-thirty. Forty-three minutes."

"Good." I stood, folding the pages into a square I could hold in my fist. "I want to be there."

"That's not usually how we⁠⁠—"

"I'm not usual." I met his eyes. "If there's a meeting about what they've done, I'm sitting in it."

Roan studied me a long moment.

"Beside me," he said finally. "Not behind, not off to the side. Beside."

It wasn't a compromise. It was a statement.

"Fine."

The main room had the heavy feel of a place built for bad nights—screens lit with feeds from outside, a center table spread with paper, chairs set the way a team sets them when they've done this enough times to know exactly where everyone needs to be.

Caleb stood at the head of the table, the scar doing nothing to soften the authority coming off him. Jace held the far wall, arms crossed, face showing nothing. Gideon sat at a side station, several screens going at once.

Roan steered me to the chair on his left without touching me. I caught the small shift in Jace's attention, the way Gideon's eyes marked it without his face moving.

"Nova's sitting in," Roan said, and it wasn't a request. "What she knows matters here."

Whatever Caleb saw in me earned a single nod. "Then let's start."

Gideon put the files up on the main screen. "Last night's work broke the rest of the way through. This isn't one operation. It's a system they've been running for more than twenty years. They look for old gifts sleeping in family lines—lines old enough to have dropped off everyone's records. Then they take the parent to keep the child in check, and they watch the child for any sign of it waking."

"The parent," I said. "You mean my mother."

"Yes. Elena Hale was taken thirteen years ago to hold over your bloodline. You—the thing in your blood stirring this close to wolves—that's the moment they'd been waiting for."

"Drake wasn't sent because Nova saw the warehouse," Caleb said. "He was already in place."