Page 25 of Guarded By The Alpha

I gave them the truth in exactly as many words as it took.

"That place is warded heavy enough that going in tonight is the kind of mistake that gets people killed. We know where she is. We don't yet have a way in that brings everyone home."

Nova's jaw tightened. I watched her take it—watched what it cost her to hold still when everything in her wanted to move right now.

"You're right," she said. The words came out like she'd had to pull them off something with edges. "I got to the same place. It still costs me."

Year thirteen. Forty minutes from here. Two days before we could move without burying somebody.

I held her eyes and said nothing, because there was no better answer to give her.

She sat down. Pulled the stills toward her with the deliberate steadiness of a woman who'd learned that calm was a weapon.

"Walk me through the wards," she said to Gideon. "I want to see the whole edge of it."

Six hours of work, and Nova was at the table for all of it.

The change happened somewhere in the third hour. I stopped explaining the footage at her and started pointing at it with her, treating her as what she was: someone whose skills filled gaps my team's training never had.

"There." She tapped a run of images along the south wall. "The crates. See how they're staggered?"

Gideon leaned in. "Supply storage."

"No. Look at the shadows—the time stamps say these came in at different times, but they're set down to make a path. That's a way in. A delivery route that runs separate from the patrol, and it probably came before the wards did." Nova traced the line with her finger. "If they put the wards up after this route was already here, the main ward layer wouldn't cover it."

Jace made a sound that might have been approval. From him, it was a standing ovation.

"She's right," Gideon said, pulling it up on his tablet. "There's a main ring and a backup layer, but there's a gap along the south side that lines up exactly with the crates."

I looked at what she'd found. My jaw tightened with the specific discomfort of redrawing a plan I'd thought was set.

"The wing where they're holding people," I said. "What about the corner the cameras can't see?"

Nova pulled a different still—the one where the coverage just stopped. "That's not a broken camera. It's the building. The angle of this corner makes a natural blind spot, either by design or because someone used it." She pointed to the roofline in the frame. "And the roof here is different from the rest. This part was added later. After the original build, after the cameras went up."

"A holding wing," Gideon said quietly. "Built to stay out of the cameras."

"That's where she is." Nova's voice was steady, but her hands pressed flat to the table in the deliberate stillness I'd learned was her version of my set jaw. "My mother's in that room."

The wolf in my chest went very still. Not quiet—still, the way a predator goes still when something it needed has just been confirmed.

We worked side by side for the next hour, her scene instincts reading the space, my field experience and the wolf's pattern sense running underneath. Together we built a way in that neither of us could have found alone.

Jace watched from across the table with the attention he saves for things he's decided not to underestimate. Gideon mapped the wards with quiet focus. Maddox worked out the fallback routes without a word, but he set a coffee at Nova's elbow at the two-hour mark—no being asked, just the plain care of a man who'd already decided where she fell inside the line of what he protects.

She noticed. She didn't say anything. She picked up the cup and kept working.

The plan settled by late afternoon: two more days of watching, a full warded approach to get through the place's defenses, Tara on the team to handle her mother once we had her.

Nova looked at me across the table. "The plan's right."

"Two days." I put weight on it. Not an order—a promise.

"I know."

Tara pulled her aside during the break. I couldn't hear it from across the room, but I watched Nova's face while she listened—watched the look of a woman taking hard truth handed to her with real care.

When Tara finished, Nova nodded once. Something in her shifted—not softer, but more settled. Like she'd been given a handhold she could actually use.