Page 63 of Guarded By The Alpha

I held my hand flat against that section of wall for sixty seconds and felt the specific weight of thirteen years pressing back through the stone. Then I filed it with the other things, and I kept working.

The man came at the four-hour mark.

Not a guard. His footfall had the deliberate quality of someone managing the nerves of a decision already made. He paused outside my door for eleven full seconds before the lock released — long enough that I'd already set myself at the table with Gideon's file open, the picture of a woman doing nothing in particular.

Late twenties. Second-tier posture — aware of being watched, tuned to it — but his eyes did something none of the guards' had done in the brief moments my door opened for water and a meal. They saw me as a person rather than a problem to be managed.

"They're moving you before the inquiry opens," he said, quiet and controlled in the way of someone who'd rehearsed it. "A second site, two hundred miles east. Off the Council's books."

I looked at him steadily. "Why are you telling me this."

He glanced at the wall where I'd spent two hours reading the wards. Then back at me.

"I've been here three years," he said. "I know what these rooms are for. I know what was done to the last person who was in this one."

He set a water cup on the table. Under it: a folded paper. A hand-drawn ward diagram, rough but precise, with a small mark in the northeast corner in different ink from the rest.

The gap. The same gap I'd been feeling in the wall for hours.

He was showing me where to wait.

I studied his face with the full attention I bring to evidence I mean to use. The jaw. The eyes. The specific quality of a man who'd reached the point everyone in such places eventually reaches — where the cost of staying silent finally outweighs everything else. He'd done his accounting. He'd arrived somewhere.

I wrote him into the margins of Gideon's file with the precision I use for witnesses I mean to call.

I gave him a label: Exhibit 14-B.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once and left. I put the diagram in my pocket and went back to the northeast wall.

The bond pulsed at the five-hour mark.

Not nearness — Roan wasn't close enough for that. Something else. A certainty moving through the connection from the far end, deliberate and absolute, the specific quality of a wolf who didn't know how to be uncertain about the things that mattered to him. It moved through the dulled distance like a hand pressed flat to the same wall from the other side.

He knew. He was already moving.

I pressed my palm to the ward gap and reached back through the bond with the plain truth of a woman who'd stopped keeping things at arm's length three weeks ago.

I'm here. I have everything. Come get me.

Twelve minutes later, the door opened.

Jace through the northeast addition — the gap the young guard had marked and I'd been mapping for six hours. Roan through the main corridor, running the forty-three-minute rotation I'd tracked since hour one. The gap between rotations was four minutes and eleven seconds. They needed three.

I was already moving, because I'd been ready for ninety minutes, and I knew the sound of Roan's footfall in a corridor from twenty feet away.

He came around the corner and his eyes found mine before anything else in the hall. Gold. All the way through, not at the edges. His wolf hadn't stood down for the length of it.

I crossed to him and put my hand on his chest over his heart. His grip on my arm wasn't gentle — the grip of a man who'd gotten back something he hadn't been sure of getting back. Through the bond I felt what the last six hours had cost him on his end.

"I have the documentation," I said.

He looked at me with the expression that meant he was adjusting for evidence that didn't fit his idea of what a person could do under pressure. I'd been getting that look from him for weeks and it still landed the same way every time.

"There's a witness." I told him about the young guard in three sentences — the face in the margins, the ward diagram, the eleven seconds outside the door. "He'll talk to Gideon. He's ready."

Roan's jaw set. Jace appeared behind us.