Page 57 of Guarded By The Alpha

"There," she said. "That's someone choosing what to send and what to hold back. Those are editing decisions—the pauses, the weight of what got left out. I know editing decisions. I make them every time I pick which frame to keep."

Gideon ran the pattern. She was right.

A contractor we'd used to relay word from the regions for four years. Enough access to confirm small details, not enough to know the wards, the team, or anything that came from Caleb's level. The damage was real but not fatal. What he'd had was enough to confirm that something waking in a protected bloodline would eventually pull a strong wolf into a bond.

They'd been waiting for my wolf to know her.

I sat with that in the empty briefing room. The math ran itself without my permission: I'd been seen coming. The one crack in six years of rebuilt discipline was the thing they'd built the whole operation around.

I was used.

It worked.

And none of it changed what I felt through the bond, or what I chose, or what she chose.

I found her in the corridor outside her mother's room. She was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, camera in her lap, eyes closed, not sleeping.

I sat beside her on the floor. The same as the power-cut corridor, six days and a lifetime ago.

She opened her eyes.

"The audit confirmed it," I said. "They planned for the bond."

She listened, gray-blue eyes steady. When I finished: "They modeled everything you'd feel. They never modeled me."

She'd said the heart of it that morning, in the conference room. Saying it again now, in different words, wasn't redundant. It was deliberate—her way of telling me she'd spent the hours since doing her own accounting and landed in the same place.

I put my hand over hers on the camera.

She turned her hand beneath mine until our fingers laced. Her grip was warm and certain—someone choosing this despite everything, because of everything, knowing exactly what it cost.

"I need you," I said.

The words came out before I could stop them—the thing I'd been holding at arm's length since the warehouse, the thing I'd built myself never to say.

Her eyes met mine. The bond pulsed between us, warm and complete.

"I know," she said.

She pulled me toward her by our joined hands, and I went. I went because she was the reason I stayed in the fight at all, because she'd seen what I was and chosen it anyway, because the thing they'd built out of my worst moment had become the thing I wanted most.

The small room off the medical corridor had a door that locked. We found it without discussion—the bond drawing us toward the same need at the same moment.

Inside, with the door closed and the building's hum gone distant through the walls, I kissed her. Not carefully. Not with the discipline I'd been using to hold myself back. I kissed her like a man who'd stopped pretending he had time to waste.

She made a sound against my mouth—approval, want, a woman who'd been waiting for this—and her hands found the hem of my shirt and pulled.

I helped her. Jacket off, shirt following, her hands running over the scars across my ribs and shoulders with the focused attention of someone cataloguing evidence she meant to keep.

"I traced these while you slept," she said. "The first night after the roof. I couldn't stop looking at them."

"Nova—"

"You carry everything alone." Her fingers found the scar along my forearm—the one I'd never explained, the one from Harrow. "I'm not going to let you carry this alone."

I pulled her shirt over her head and found the mark on her shoulder with my mouth. The silver was warm beneath my lips, answering in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. She arched into it with a sound that went straight through me.

"Yours," she said against my jaw. "Mine."