Page 5 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Pack Guard. We don't show up in any registry you'd know how to search."

I let that sit. Pack Guard. The name had a shape to it—something with rules and a hierarchy, people who knew exactly what they were guarding against.

"And you're what—security?"

"Field commander."

The title landed with weight. Not bragging. Just true.

"The thing at the window," I said. "You called it a cleaner."

"The Veil Council's." His grip on the wheel didn't change, but something in his shoulders pulled tighter. "He makes witnesses disappear. Anyone who sees what they're not supposed to see."

"And I walked into a place he'd been keeping quiet."

"Yes."

"So now I'm a thing that needs cleaning up."

Roan didn't answer right away. The silence held for three blocks, and I understood he was giving me room to feel the size of it before he said the rest.

"You photographed a place the Council has used for three years," he said finally. "And you watched me change. Either one of those is enough to put you on a list. Both of them—" His eyes cut to me, gold flickering at the edges before settling back to something that could pass for human. "You stopped being a bystander the second you raised that camera."

The words landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there, heavy, a threat I couldn't photograph my way out of. I sat very still with it and didn't let him see what it did to me.

I wanted to. That was the strange part. Some animal part of me wanted to turn to this man I'd known for ninety minutes and let him see exactly how scared I was, and I had never in my life wanted that from anyone.

"What are you?" I asked instead. The question I'd been carrying since the basement. "Exactly."

"Wolf. Shifter. The difference matters."

"Wolf as in⁠⁠—"

"As in the animal. As in the thing you almost saw all the way." His jaw worked once. "I don't show that to people. Not unless I have no other choice."

"Then why did I see it?"

He was quiet a long moment. When he spoke again his voice had dropped, rougher at the edges.

"I don't know."

That answer hit me harder than anything else he'd said. The honesty of it. The man who'd moved through that warehouse like he owned every shadow in it, who'd put himself between me and whatever was coming without a flicker of hesitation, who clearly lived by rules I couldn't begin to guess at—and he didn't know why his control had slipped.

For some reason that was the moment I decided to trust him. Not the rescue. The not-knowing. He could have lied and I'd never have caught it, and he didn't.

The place came up on us without warning.

A district that looked dead from the outside—chain-link gone to rust, boarded windows, the particular decay of somewhere people had stopped asking questions about. But as the SUV crossed some invisible line at the edge of it, I felt the change.

Pressure. A faint push against my skin that had nothing to do with the cold. Something in the air itself, invisible and total.

"You felt that," Roan said. Not a question.

"What is it?"

"A ward. It keeps out anyone who isn't meant to come in." He pulled into a bay that shouldn't have fit inside the building's walls. "You shouldn't have been able to feel it at all."

I didn't have anything to say to that. The warmth in my chest—the thing I'd been calling adrenaline since the warehouse—pulsed once, faint, and I pressed my hand flat against my camera bag just to have something to hold.