Page 7 of Guarded By The Alpha

I hadn't been able to name it. I'd called it adrenaline because adrenaline was a word I trusted.

I was starting to think it had never been adrenaline.

"The man who brought me in," I said. "Roan. He said I shouldn't have been able to feel it."

Tara's hands paused on the vial. "Feel what?"

"The ward. When we crossed in. I felt it." I held her eyes. "He said someone like me—someone with no connection to any of this—shouldn't have felt it that clearly."

Something moved behind her face. Not alarm. Attention. The kind that comes before more questions, not before easy answers.

"I'm going to run a few extra things on your blood," she said. Her voice stayed level, careful, but I'd spent seven years learning the difference between calm and managed, and this was managed. "Nothing that'll hurt. Just a couple of things I want to look at."

"What things?"

"The kind that might tell me why you're this calm." She labeled the vial with a quick flick. "And why you felt the wards."

I watched her handle the samples with a care that went past anything routine. Whatever she was hunting for, it wasn't on the standard list.

The warmth in my chest pulsed again. Faint. Steady. Refusing to leave.

She carried the blood to a station at the side of the room and worked in silence for a while, and I sat on the table and catalogued the place out of pure habit—the camera might be in the bag, but the part of me that documents never switches off.

Then she went still.

Not the stillness of concentrating. The stillness of someone reading a result, and then reading it again to make sure they read it right.

She looked at the screen. She looked at me. She looked at the screen again.

The quiet that opened up between us was not a casual quiet.

"I need to run this again," she said. Level. Careful. But I'd spent seven years learning to read the space between what people show and what they're holding back. "There's something here I wasn't expecting."

She didn't say what.

She turned back to the station and started a second draw, and I sat there with my hands steady in my lap and the warmth still burning low in my chest and the slow, certain knowledge settling over me that the thing I'd been calling wrong all night—the calm, the pull, the way my body kept deciding things before my mind caught up—was never going to have an ordinary answer.

The question I didn't ask out loud, because I wasn't ready for the answer: what had Tara Quinn just seen in my blood?

Chapter 3

The Wolf Who Stayed

ROAN

Four minutes. Thirty-seven seconds.

I'd counted every one of them, standing outside the medical room door like some kind of sentry who'd forgotten his post was supposed to be somewhere else. The hum of the lights overhead was the only sound in the corridor, that and the low murmur of Tara's voice through the door, even and unhurried, asking questions I couldn't quite make out.

My wolf pressed against my ribs like a caged thing testing the bars. Not snarling. Worse. Attentive. Every ounce of its focus aimed at the woman on the other side of that door, and the discipline I'd spent six years grinding into my bones was the only thing keeping my hand off the handle.

I made myself walk away.

The briefing room was three corridors and one deliberate change of direction from the medical wing. I pulled up the warehouse images on the main screen, clean lines spreading across the display—work, the thing that had always been able to hold me. It didn't hold me now. Some part of me I couldn't shut off was still tracking her. Not through any camera, not through any feed I could point to and call my job. Through something older than the job. Something that had nothing to do with command.

I knew exactly where she was. Down to the room. Down to where she sat in it. The knowledge sat in my chest like a second pulse, and I had no rule for that. In six years I'd never needed one.

The door opened behind me.