Page 3 of Guarded By The Alpha

The directness hit me harder than fear. I was a woman who trusted evidence. I'd built my entire career, my entire life, around the principle that what you could document was real and what you couldn't was speculation. And the most disorienting thing in front of me was that this man—this creature—was giving me truth in two syllables without softening either one.

He could have hidden. He could have run. He could have vanished into the dark and let me convince myself I'd imagined it, let me go home to my spare apartment and lie awake wondering if I was losing my mind.

Instead he'd come toward me with his hands visible and said yes like it was nothing.

"What are you?" The question came out more curious than afraid, which frightened me too.

"Wolf." A beat. "Shifter. The distinction matters, but not right now." His eyes cut to something behind me, then back. "Right now, what matters is that you saw something you weren't supposed to see, and the people who used this warehouse are not going to be happy about that."

"The trafficking operation."

"Among other things." His jaw did something complicated. "You're a crime scene photographer. You document evidence for a living. You just documented me."

"I documented a man having some kind of episode in a basement." The lie came automatically—the kind of thing I might have said to a supervisor, to a cop, to anyone asking questions I didn't want to answer. "Bad lighting. Stress response. I've been working for six hours; I could have seen anything."

"You could have." He took one step closer, and the heat in my chest flared like someone had turned up a dial I didn't know I had. "But you didn't. You saw exactly what happened, and you haven't talked yourself out of it yet."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you're still holding your camera like you're going to use it, and you're asking me questions instead of running."

He was right.

The warehouse floor was thirty seconds behind me. The loading dock exit was maybe forty-five seconds beyond that. I'd mapped my exits the moment I arrived, the way I always did, the way seven years of walking into the aftermath had taught me.

I hadn't taken a single step toward any of them.

"The people who used this warehouse," I said instead, because my brain had apparently decided that asking questions was a better survival strategy than running. "What are they?"

"Worse than what I am." He said it without ego, without drama—just another fact in a night that had stopped making sense twenty seconds ago. "And if you're still here when they come back to clean up, you're going to find out exactly how much worse."

"You said what you are isn't the threat tonight." I watched his face as I said it, reading him the way I read crime scenes—looking for the tells, the inconsistencies, the places where the official story didn't match the physical evidence. "You said tonight. Does that mean you could be the threat tomorrow?"

Something shifted in his expression. Not a softening—he didn't look like a man who softened. More like surprise. The way you might look at someone who had just done something unexpected.

"You're not supposed to ask questions like that," he said.

"I'm not supposed to see men reshape their own bones either. It's been a weird night."

That almost got a reaction. Almost.

"Come with me," he said again. "I can get you somewhere safe while we figure out what happens next."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'm going to stand here and make sure nothing happens to you until you change your mind, and whatever is coming is going to find both of us exactly where we're standing."

I ran it through one more time.

He could have hidden. He could have run. He could have done any number of things easier than standing in this basement offering protection to a woman who had just watched him be something other than human.

Whatever had used this warehouse—whatever had bolted those chains to the concrete, whatever had made a child leave a pink velcro shoe by the drain—it wasn't him.

Every piece of evidence I had said he was the only thing currently standing between me and the answer.

"Fine." I lowered the camera. "But I'm not deleting those photos."

"I wouldn't expect you to."