Page 65 of Guarded By The Alpha

The next two hours were the tight, controlled tension of a team defending a place it knew was about to be hit.

I ran the outer edge twice, scenting for Council wolves, finding nothing but the cold mineral taste of the wards and the far-off exhaust of the industrial blocks past them. Jace checked in every seven minutes with the economy of a man who said more in silence than most people managed in paragraphs.

Gideon caught Drake's first move forty minutes in.

Not at the edge. Inside the warded district.

"He's through the outer ward," Gideon said over the comm, flat with the focus of a man processing news he didn't like. "Which means he can break wards better than we'd figured."

I shifted to cut off the new angle. Jace was already moving before I gave the order—this was the Jace I trusted most, the one who ran on instinct sharpened by a decade of hunting and didn't need handling.

The comm crackled. "He's moving sideways. Not toward the main door. He's after something specific."

Then Nova, flat and exact: "Camera seven. East corridor, outside. He's been dodging its exact angle for twenty minutes, too clean to be luck. He knows precisely where that lens is."

A beat.

"He's been here before. Not this building—this district. He mapped it."

Gideon pulled the district's old footage. I heard the keystrokes through the open channel, the short pause that meant he was checking what Nova had spotted against the archive.

She was right.

Three weeks before the warehouse, before Nova, before any of this—Drake had walked the warded district and learned it. Camera positions. Ward anchor points. The old side routes that showed up on building plans from before the agency took the space.

He'd been planning a way at the agency itself longer than Nova had been under our protection.

The whole shape of it shifted with a realization I should have had days ago. This wasn't a reaction to the case we'd filed against the Council. This had been on Drake's list already—our filing may have moved up his timing, but the target was set before the Council's session was ever in danger.

He was a man finishing a contract that had just turned worthless, and nothing in his history said he was built to stop halfway through.

I went out with Jace at nine-forty.

When it came, the fight wasn't at the perimeter.

Drake was too good for the obvious approach. It was at the side door on the east face—the one on the original building plans, the one our cameras had a forty-degree blind spot on because of a support column nobody had ever moved.

Drake had three weeks to find everything our usual coverage missed.

He hadn't had ten days to learn what Nova Hale's eyes caught in a camera feed.

Four seconds before Drake reached the side door, her voice came through the comm with the quiet precision of someone reading evidence in real time.

"He's at the east column. Side door, not the main one. Moving now."

Four seconds was enough.

Jace and I were already there.

It was short, and it was ugly in the controlled way these things are. Drake was good—I felt the coiled danger in him the second he registered us, the specific stillness of a man who'd killed more people than I wanted to count. My wolf ran hot under my skin, gold bleeding into the edges of my sight, and I didn't bother pulling it back, because there was nothing professional in this and pretending otherwise was a waste.

But Drake expected the blind spot to hold, and it didn't.

The half-second he spent recalculating was all the room I needed.

He went down hard—Jace on his flank, my weight across his chest, my forearm against his throat. His eyes met mine, cold and calculating and not at all surprised. A professional accepting a professional's loss.

But Drake didn't go down without making one last call.