Page 44 of Guarded By The Alpha

I was already awake when Roan called the briefing.

Gideon's voice had carried through the corridor at 0400 — low, controlled, the specific cadence of someone delivering news that had to be handled carefully. I'd noted the quality of the silence that followed it, the way the safe house's background noise shifted from resting to alert in the span of three seconds. Something had changed. I knew it before anyone said a word.

The kitchen table had become a command post. I sat in the chair I'd claimed over the past few days — second from the left, sightline to both the east window and the corridor. I held myself in the particular stillness I'd built for crime scenes. Body quiet. Mind recording everything.

Roan stood at the head of the table with Gideon's printed transcript face-down in front of him. The first thing I photographed in my memory wasn't the transcript but his jaw — the specific set of it I'd learned meant he'd already taken in the worst and was deciding what to do with it. His eyes swept the room once, marking each person. When they landed on me, they held half a second longer than they needed to.

Elena wasn't in this one. Tara had kept her in the medical wing with the quiet competence of someone who understood that certain news lands differently when you've spent thirteen years as someone else's leverage. I filed that decision as evidence of the kind of care this team practiced without announcing it.

The word entered the room without ceremony.

"Informant," Gideon said, and set his transcript on the table. Flat. Factual. The syllables carried the weight of something that had just cracked the foundation. "Drake gave up one thing under questioning, on his own. The chain of approval for what the Council did to Nova runs through someone in our own wider circle."

I watched every person at the table take it in their own way.

Jace went very still — the kind of stillness that meant his wolf was paying closer attention than his face let on. His hands stayed flat on the table, but I could see the tension in his forearms, the way his weight had shifted forward onto the balls of his feet even sitting down.

Maddox had come straight from getting Drake locked down, still carrying the night on him. He set down his coffee with the careful deliberateness of a man deciding how angry he was allowed to be. The mug made no sound against the wood.

Roan didn't move at all.

I read the room — not with a camera, but the same way I read a scene. The physical record a moment leaves behind. The evidence of what breaks and what holds. This was what a safe house looked like in the moment after trust had been broken and the people inside it had to decide what came next.

I didn't look away from any of it.

"Timeline," Gideon went on, pulling up a second page. "The Council had our location within six hours of Nova coming in — not this house, but the main facility, then the top-tier guard schedule, then the open window that gave Drake his way in."

"That narrows it," Jace said. His voice was rougher than usual.

"Eight names." Gideon spread a printed list across the table. "People in our wider circle with access to Caleb's level of communication and to where we assign safe houses. Contractors. Coordinators. A former field man on retainer. A relay who handles encrypted routing."

None of the names meant anything to me. But I watched Roan's eyes move down the list with the precision of a man who knew every person on it as more than a job title.

"Jace," he said.

Jace had been with the agency longer than anyone at the table except Roan. I'd picked that up in fragments over the past days — the way the others deferred to his instincts, the way his silence carried a different weight than Maddox's quiet or Gideon's measured calculation.

He took the list, closed his eyes for a moment that looked like stillness but was active recall, and cut three names right away.

"Weren't near the terminal during the window that matters." His eyes opened. "Leaves five."

The six hours of narrowing five to one was where I turned out to matter in a way I hadn't expected.

Gideon's archive was thorough. Sophisticated. Built to catch digital oddities, behavior flagged by the system, message timing that didn't match what someone claimed to be doing.

What it wasn't built to catch was the specific register of human tells that aren't digital — the body language of someone managing a secret in a professional setting. The small patterns of avoidance and deflection that show up in posture and the way a person chooses where to stand, not in a data log.

I'd spent seven years reading crime scenes.

I read people the same way.

"Pull the building's ordinary footage," I said. "Not the flagged security feeds. The plain cameras that just log who moves through the common areas."

Gideon looked at me for about two seconds — the measuring quality of someone rethinking an assumption — and pulled it without a word.

I sat in front of the screen for ninety minutes.

The first oddity showed up at the forty-minute mark: someone kept turning up near Caleb's communications terminal at times that didn't match his logged access. Subtle. The kind of thing that looks like coincidence until you've seen enough coincidences to know when they aren't.