Page 72 of Guarded By The Alpha

"And I need you to not manage me around it. No softening, no keeping your distance, no adjusting what you say to me based on where you think I am with it. If I'm working through something, I'm working through it in front of you, not around you."

"Yes."

She nodded once. She didn't reach across the table. She didn't make it easy. I didn't want her to—I wanted the honest version, even when the honest version meant sitting across from a woman I'd take buildings apart for and not being allowed to close the distance yet, because she was telling me what she needed, and what she needed was for me to hold it without managing it. So that was what I'd do.

"What do you need from me while you work through it?"

The question landed differently than I meant it to—or exactly as I meant it, which was why it landed at all. She looked at me with the expression she kept for things that had gotten through her guard, the slight shift behind her eyes, the tell I'd learned meant something had registered in the place beneath her competence.

"That," she said. "That question. Keep asking it instead of deciding."

I held her gaze. "All right."

We stayed at the table another twenty minutes. The talk shifted—not away from what had just happened, but alongside it—into where things stood: Drake in custody, the case filed, the Council's session suspended pending inquiry. We worked through it with the specific productive friction of two people whose working relationship had turned into something else and was sharper and more useful for it.

Her crime scene instinct read the gaps I mapped from the field side; our approaches fit the way matching halves fit, and we both knew it, and neither of us said it, and it was present in the room anyway.

The bond between us was warm and intact—not the aching distance of the night, not yet the full ease of two people who'd put something down, but something true and working and real. She was holding something. I was going to let her hold it.

At the end of it she stood and picked up the printout and folded it in half with the careful, deliberate motion she used for things she meant to keep.

"I'm keeping this," she said.

"All right," I said.

"Not to use against you." A beat. "As a record. Of what the beginning looked like before it became what it is."

My chest did something I didn't have clean words for—not relief and not grief but the specific register between them, the place where everything that mattered to me about her lived. I stayed still and let it land the way she'd asked me to let things land: without managing it into something smaller.

She picked up her camera from the chair beside her—she'd brought it down from her room, which meant she'd come here already decided, which meant the accounting she did last night had arrived somewhere before she walked through that door—and she didn't photograph the printout or the table or me, but she held the camera the way she held things she wasn't ready to put down yet, and that told me something too.

The morning light was coming through the east windows now, pale and cold, catching the edge of the table where we'd spent the last hour building something neither of us could name yet. My wolf was quiet in a way that had nothing to do with submission and everything to do with recognition—the specific stillness of an animal that understood waiting.

Caleb appeared in the doorway at 0612 with the expression I'd learned over eight years to read as: the next seventy-two hours have just changed shape.

He was holding a secure tablet, which meant the news was recent and confirmed, and his eyes moved from me to Nova and back with the assessment of a man working out which conversation he was walking into.

"The oversight bodies answered the submission," Caleb said, without preamble, because Caleb didn't use preamble when the news was urgent enough to justify walking into a room that clearly wasn't a standard briefing. "The inquiry meets in thirty-six hours. They've asked the bloodline witness to give testimony in person before the board."

A pause that carried weight.

"It's not an order. It's a request."

Nova went very still beside the table—the deliberate stillness, the held processing—and I read the room the way I read rooms when everything mattered: Caleb's jaw was set in the configuration that meant the stakes weren't just high, they were decisive.

"If she testifies," Caleb went on, "and the board takes the record, the Council's network comes all the way down—not managed, not reshuffled, not driven into a quieter shape that resurfaces in three years. Down." He set the tablet on the table between us. "If she declines, or the testimony falls short, the board settles for what they have and we spend the next decade watching the Council rebuild from the parts we missed."

Nova looked at the tablet. Then she looked at me.

Her expression wasn't fear—I'd learned the difference between her fear face and her deciding face, and this was her deciding face—and the question in the room wasn't whether she could walk into an inquiry and give testimony that took down a criminal network using her own blood as the spine of the case.

The question, the one neither Caleb nor I said out loud because we both already knew it, was what it would cost her—and whether anyone in this room had the right to ask.

I watched her work it through. The camera in her hands. The printout folded in her pocket. The bond between us warm and present and carrying something she was still working through.

"The full board," Caleb said. "All seven oversight seats. And the Council's lawyer." He paused. "They're going to fight it. They'll challenge where the evidence came from, question the bloodline records, and try to discredit the witness. Standard moves from people who've been managing their crimes for decades."

Nova's chin lifted slightly. The tell I'd learned meant she was no longer calculating—she was deciding.