Page 64 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Two minutes," Jace said.

Roan's hand tightened on mine once — brief, absolute, the grip of a man making a promise without words — and we moved.

In the car, with the building falling away behind us, I sat with Roan's shoulder against mine and Gideon's marked-up file in my lap.

"Drake will go for the safe house next," I said.

I felt Roan's agreement through the bond before he spoke — the shape of a decision already made. A professional working without orders and with nothing left to hold him back.

"We need to be there first," he said.

I looked at the file. Guard rotation. Three-tier order. Two supply lines. The ward-change timeline. Six hours of watching from inside a place that had never expected to be documented from within.

The Council had changed me back to a keep silent about what I could say. They'd put me inside their own walls to do it.

I turned to the next clean margin and kept working.

Chapter 21

Nothing Leaves Unclaimed

ROAN

The moment Maddox gave me the news, I was already moving.

Drake was out. Off the transport. Twenty minutes ago.

The calls sorted themselves in my head before my wolf had fully registered what the threat meant—Drake, professional, loose, and working without anyone's order to bring Nova back. Which was worse than Drake on a leash. A man executing a contract had limits, a handler who could call him off. A man whose contract had just become politically worthless had none of that.

I'd thought through this exact night three weeks ago, when Drake first showed up at our edge. I'd built the plan and hoped never to use it.

I used it without hesitating.

"Jace—outer line. Track his scent, hold, don't take him alone." My voice carried the flat certainty of twelve years of command, and Jace was already moving before I finished. "Maddox—inside. Every back door sealed in ninety seconds. Gideon⁠—"

"Already pulling every camera in the warded district," Gideon said from the doorway, tablet in hand, fingers moving with the ease of a man who'd seen this conversation coming about forty-five seconds out.

Nova watched me give all four orders in under a minute. She stood at the briefing table with her camera bag already over her shoulder, jaw set with the steadiness she'd spent ten days learning was the most useful thing she owned. The silver mark on her shoulder caught the overhead light when she moved—faintly bright, permanent, the finished shape of something I'd been building toward for ten days without saying so.

I went to her last. Not because she mattered least, but because she was the one I couldn't send anyone else to, and the walk across the room took three seconds and felt like restraint made physical.

"Drake," she said. Not a question.

"Outside the edge. No camera on him yet." I confirmed it. "Which means he's moving smart."

"He always moves smart." Her voice had an edge—not fear, but the recognition of a woman who'd read Drake for ten days and knew what professional patience looked like once it had been cut loose from its orders. "That's the whole problem."

I took her to the safest interior room we had—the one Maddox ran the building's defenses through, the walls humming with the low vibration of the wards, screens lining them with the feeds Gideon was already routing to the main display.

I didn't tell her to stay put like someone being managed.

"I need you here because you read people better than anyone I've got," I said. "Drake's going to move in a pattern. Watch Gideon's feeds. Tell me what you see."

She sat down in front of the screens without argument. Her hands were steady on the console. Her eyes moved across the feeds with the systematic attention of a woman who'd spent seven years building evidence and knew exactly what one small detail, in the right sequence, was worth.

It told me she understood why I'd put her here, trusted it, and was choosing to be useful instead of sidelined—the only thing I could have asked for, and the thing I couldn't say out loud without the sentence going somewhere else entirely.

I left her with Gideon and went to work the perimeter, and the bond stretched taut and steady at my back like a hand holding the other end of a rope.