Page 75 of Guarded By The Alpha

"I talked to Caleb this morning," he said. "Before you came to the briefing room."

He paused—the specific Roan pause that made space for a question rather than filling it.

I asked.

He told me: he'd called Caleb and formally torn up the classification that filed my bloodline as something the agency could own. On record. No longer something they could access, manage, or use.

My blood was mine. My mother's record belonged to the oversight inquiry, not to agency files.

He'd done it before I said yes. He was telling me now because I'd asked him not to manage me, and this was what that looked like from the inside—action before announcement, telling me without making a performance of it.

I stood in the corridor and let it land.

The bond in my chest was warm and specific and I didn't put distance between myself and the feeling.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded.

"That's not all I needed."

He met my eyes. "I know. Tell me the rest."

I said: I needed to know the agency was somewhere I belonged, not somewhere I was being protected.

He looked at me with the measuring quality that came before he treated something as worth real weight.

Then: "Caleb's putting an evidence specialist position on record. It's yours if you want it. Not a conversion—your role, your terms, your methods."

I held that a moment. "Did you push for it?"

"Yes."

"Good," I said, and went back to work.

Jace's contribution came without ceremony.

He appeared in the doorway at hour eleven of the prep and watched me work through a cross-referenced timeline for about four minutes. Then he said—to no one in particular, in the flat tone he kept for assessments he'd already finalized—"She's going to take them apart."

He left before the sentence finished settling.

Tara caught my eye across the room. I looked back at my notes and refilled my coffee.

Maddox, that evening, fixed the coffee machine on the prep floor without being asked, left a full pot running for the overnight session, and was gone before anyone thought to comment.

I noted it. I didn't say anything. I refilled my cup and kept going.

The found-family register was steady and low and it was the most reliable thing in the room.

The night before the inquiry, with the testimony built and the case filed and the counter-motion holding, I took myself to the east corridor.

The same corridor where Roan and I had sat on the floor during the power cut. Where I'd first reached for his hand in the half-awake space before my defenses had finished engaging.

I didn't decide to come here. I simply ended up here, which was its own kind of answer.

Roan came and sat beside me without being called and without making it a gesture. Our shoulders touched. Neither of us spoke for a while.

I was working through something and he wasn't filling the silence around it. Both things were true at once—the warmth of the bond between us and the room he was still giving me inside it. Which was what repair actually looked like in practice rather than in theory.