Page 6 of Guarded By The Alpha

Inside, everything moved with purpose.

It had the bones of a military place—wide corridors, hard flat light, people who moved with the economy of bodies that had trained the waste out of themselves. Several of them were very large. Every one of them looked at me before they looked at anything else, a quick sweep I recognized because it was the same thing I did walking into a room: where is the danger, and is it her.

It wasn't hostile. It wasn't friendly either.

Roan moved through the place like weather. He didn't announce himself. He just arrived, and the room rearranged around him. Two men in the main corridor gave ground as he passed and didn't seem to know they'd done it.

I knew. I always saw the thing people didn't mean to show.

A man came toward us from where two corridors met—older, scarred down one side of his face in a way that said violence survived rather than dealt, carrying the kind of authority that belongs to people who've made terrible choices and stopped second-guessing them. He looked at me the way I looked at a scene that had just grown a complication.

Weighing me. Not cruel. But nothing soft in it either.

"The witness," he said. His voice was low, level, the kind that expected to be obeyed without raising itself.

"Nova Hale," Roan said. "Crime scene photographer. She got the whole site and about four seconds of me before I pulled it back."

"The Cleaner?"

"There. Didn't move on her. He's already on her trail."

The man's eyes came to me and stayed. I understood, without anyone saying it, that he was doing the math—what I was worth against what I'd cost him. I looked back at him the way I look at a room where something terrible has already happened. Steady.

He caught it. Something shifted in his face—not approval. Just notice.

"Get her checked over first," he said. "Quinn can do that. We'll talk in the morning, once she's settled."

Settled. Like luggage. Like a thing you put somewhere and deal with later. I heard exactly what I was to them in that one word, and filed it—the only thing I let myself file all night, because that one I needed.

A woman was at my elbow before he finished—dark hair pulled back, brisk, moving like someone who had walked frightened people through impossible nights before and knew the route by heart. She didn't offer comfort she couldn't back up. She offered the truth.

"Tara Quinn. I'm the medic here. I'm going to check you over, make sure you're in one piece, and answer what I can answer." She met my eyes straight on. "This part's easy. The hard part comes later."

I liked her on the spot. No performance to her.

"Okay," I said.

I followed her because she was easy to read, and right now easy to read was all I could handle. Roan watched us go. I didn't look back, but I knew exactly where he was standing when the door shut between us, and I hated a little that I knew.

The medical room was clean and plain, lit with the same hard, comfortless light as everything else.

I sat on the table and watched Tara work through her questions with the ease of someone who'd done it a thousand times. When did I last eat. Old injuries. Anything I was allergic to. The ordinariness of it was almost funny.

It wasn't funny at all.

My hands were in my lap. Steady. They'd been steady since the warehouse, through the drive, through the older man weighing me in the corridor, through that wall of pressure at the edge of the district that I still had no name for. I'd photographed murders with shakier hands than these.

"You're calmer than most people are when they come through here after a night like yours," Tara said, not looking up from her tablet. There was no accusation in it. Just an observation. "Especially the ones who started out human."

"I noticed."

"How long has that been true?" Now she looked up, and her attention had a different quality than the older man's—not weighing me, but recognizing something. "The not falling apart."

I thought about it honestly. "Long enough that I stopped thinking it was strange."

She made a note. Said nothing more about it.

We moved to the blood draw. She was quick, sure, the needle barely registering—and I looked at the crook of my own arm under the hard light and felt it again. That warmth low in my chest. Present since the warehouse. Present since I'd stood ten feet from Roan Vale and felt my feet refuse to move while everything sane in me screamed to run.