Page 43 of Guarded By The Alpha

After, the quiet settled in the way it does once violence has passed through a place.

Maddox came up from inside to secure Drake for the trip back without being asked—because that was Maddox, the necessary things, done. Jace swept the perimeter in a silence that said everything about how the south had ended. Through the comm I could hear Gideon already laying out how he'd question Drake, three steps ahead of an interrogation that hadn't started.

Nova was sitting on the roof where it had ended.

Her hands were steady. The photographer's discipline—the calm she reaches for when falling apart would be easier. Her jaw was set with the tension of a woman taking in something big by holding very still.

I crossed the roof. Crouched in front of her instead of standing over her, because I'd learned, in the small hours of being thrown together and telling each other the truth, that this was what she needed. Near, without looming.

She looked at me.

Gold still bleeding through my eyes. Breathing harder than she'd ever seen me breathe. The cut along my forearm I hadn't acknowledged and wouldn't, because acknowledging it meant stopping, and I hadn't let myself stop yet.

She reached for my face with both hands.

Not carefully. Not as a question—as a statement, the same directness she'd brought to everything since the warehouse. I leaned into it with none of my usual hold on myself, and my eyes closed for exactly three seconds.

Three seconds of something that wasn't holding it together. Three seconds of a man who'd been carrying everything for six days and two fights and one bond he had no name for, letting himself be held instead.

When I opened my eyes, the gold was still there.

I didn't apologize for that either.

Gideon brought the first pages from Drake forty minutes later.

Drake was secured in the vehicle. Maddox had the rest of it handled. Nova was inside with her mother and Tara, and the safe house had gone quiet in the specific way places go quiet after violence has moved through them.

Gideon's face didn't change when he handed me the pages—it never does—but there was something in his stillness I'd learned to read over six years. The thing that comes right before news I won't want.

It was four pages. He'd flagged one part.

"He gave this up on his own," Gideon said. "Not under pressure. Offered it."

I read it.

The order on Nova had been signed off through a name. Not a Council name. Not an outsider. A name inside our own circle—someone with access to our files, our safe-house rotations, who we had under protection and where.

Someone had told the Council Nova was with us. Someone had handed over which safe house. Someone had given them the window that let Drake come in with four men and a roof approach he should never have known to take.

There was a traitor inside the very network we'd built our safety on.

Drake had given us the name.

I looked at it a long moment. Felt my jaw set, my eyes go fully gold—not at the edges, all the way through—for the first time since the fight ended. Gideon, who'd stood in rooms with me through six years and never once given ground, gave ground now.

"Nova can't know this yet." My voice was lower than it should have been. "Not until I know how far it reaches."

Gideon said nothing.

Which meant he already had a theory about how far it reached.

And it wasn't one that ended cleanly.

Chapter 14

The Mother File

NOVA