Page 42 of Guarded By The Alpha

It was short. I didn't waste motion on anything that wouldn't end it.

His partner hesitated. Half a second, reading how the first one had ended, rethinking his line. It was the right instinct. It was also too slow.

I took the blade in my forearm during the second exchange. Felt it, marked it—the cold-then-hot of metal parting skin, the angle that told me it had missed anything that mattered—and didn't stop. Pain was just information. I filed it and kept going.

Both of them were down in under ninety seconds.

I didn't check them. I already knew.

Drake came over the roof at the four-minute mark.

I'd expected it. Set myself for it. The roof was the one angle my ground coverage didn't fully reach, and Drake was too good to take the obvious way when the obvious way was the one I'd be watching.

He landed with the control of a man who'd done it hundreds of times—a drop from the maintenance access, blade already out, eyes sweeping for his target.

He found me instead.

What followed had the quality of two men who'd been circling each other for a week finally standing in the same place. Drake was cold. Methodical. Truly frightening in the way of someone who'd done this for decades and never lost sleep over it.

I was gold-eyed and carrying the whole weight of what I was protecting.

"Vale." His voice was flat, easy, like we'd met at a conference instead of on a rooftop. "This doesn't have to get complicated. Give her up and your agency walks away whole."

"No."

"The Council won't stop. You know that. She's worth too much to let go."

"Then they can keep sending people." My voice dropped, something not entirely human bleeding through. "I'll keep putting them down."

Drake's face didn't change. He'd expected the answer. Maybe even respected it, the way professionals respect each other's commitment right up until one of them dies for it.

He moved first.

He was fast—faster than his men, faster than most wolves I'd fought—and he had decades of doing exactly this up close. The first exchange tested my guard. The second pushed harder, a combination meant to tip me off balance.

I held. Barely.

The gold wasn't just at the edges of my eyes anymore. It was everywhere, bleeding through everything I saw, and the wolf was roaring with something that had nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with the woman two floors below.

Drake was working off one belief: that Nova was inside with Maddox and Tara and her mother. Tucked away. Out of it.

He was wrong.

Nova came through the maintenance access at Drake's blind side with about forty-five seconds of watching behind her and the heavy comm unit from the east room in her hands.

I saw her before he did. Of course I did—the wolf tracked where she was in every room of every building she stood in, had been tracking her since the warehouse like a compass that only knew one direction.

She'd read the fight from where she'd been watching. She'd seen inside half a minute that I'd set myself to take Drake alone. And she'd decided—with the specific stubbornness I was learning ran under everything she did—that alone was a weakness.

She threw the unit at his shoulder with the force and aim of a woman who'd been hauling heavy equipment through crime scenes for seven years.

It didn't stop him. It broke his footing for about two seconds.

Two seconds was enough.

I took him down with everything his lost balance gave me, every opening she'd made. It ended with Drake out cold—not dead, not by choice, but because the human part of me overrode the wolf's screaming and made the call that a living Drake was answers a dead one couldn't give.

I held that decision. My hands weren't entirely steady doing it.