Page 60 of Guarded By The Alpha

At hour three, I caught something his footage had recorded but never flagged: the way the Council's wolves deferred to each other, a pattern that mapped their pecking order more precisely than any chart could.

"There," I said, pointing to a stretch of the feed. "The way the man on the left angles his body when the one in the gray coat comes in. And again here—the slight pause before he speaks. That's not random. That's pack."

Gideon went very still for a moment. His fingers moved across the keys, pulling related footage. "You're right. That's a man yielding to someone above him. Gray coat ranks higher than we'd ever placed him."

"Match his movements against the big decisions over the last six months," I said. "If he's higher than you thought, he may have had the authority to sign off on things you never traced to him."

Gideon ran it. His face didn't change, but his voice carried something new. "He does. He's the one who approved the tip that sent Roan to that warehouse."

I filed that. Kept working.

At hour seven, I found the second piece—a marker in the supplies at Drake's site that tied the bloodline program to three separate operations the oversight bodies had been chasing on their own for years.

"The crates in the holding wing," I said, pulling the memory into focus. "The maker's mark was half hidden, but I saw enough to place it. Same company that supplies the Council's offices."

"Which offices?" Gideon's voice was controlled, but I could feel the intensity under it.

"The ones named in these three files." I pointed to the oversight paperwork he'd given me. "The supply line connects them. One company, several sites, all tied to bloodline work the oversight bodies could never prove were linked."

Gideon went still again. This time, when he spoke, there was something like awe in it. "That closes the chain."

I kept working.

Roan moved through the room at intervals—checking on me, checking the building, carrying the weight of a job that had turned from fighting to paperwork in ways that weren't his usual ground. He didn't hover. He appeared with the same economy he brought to everything.

At hour ten, a cup of coffee landed within my reach. No comment. Just the cup, and the brief warmth of him before he moved off to talk quietly with Gideon about the channel.

At hour twelve, I felt him standing behind my chair while I worked through a hard stretch of the timeline. His attention on the pages had a specific quality—not assessment, not supervision. Witness. A man watching something that mattered.

The bond turned me toward him each time he was near. Warm. Certain. A compass point I'd stopped fighting and started using.

At hour fourteen, Maddox brought food for the whole table without a word. He stayed to go over the physical security for the submission with Gideon while Tara and I worked the last of the bloodline section.

At hour sixteen, Jace appeared in the doorway and didn't leave.

He didn't add to the work—it wasn't his skill—but his presence in that doorway was the pack version of standing guard. I'd been inside this world long enough to read it.

The case was complete at four on the second day.

Fourteen hours before the Council session.

Gideon sent it through the channel he'd spent three years building. The answer came back in under two hours.

The oversight bodies had it. The Council session was suspended pending review. A formal inquiry was open.

Gideon read the reply aloud in a voice that was, for him, remarkably unguarded. "Package received and verified. Council session suspended pending review. Formal inquiry authorized."

The room was very quiet.

Then Jace, from the doorway, said: "Good."

For Jace, that was an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm.

In the quiet after, I sat at the table and let myself feel what I'd been holding at arm's length for eighteen hours.

The work was spread around me—stills, timelines, Tara's bloodline analysis, the supply-line connections I'd pulled out of memory. All of it built into something the oversight bodies could act on.

The agency wasn't going to be torn down tonight.