Page 8 of Guarded By The Alpha

Gideon Cross came in with the quiet of a man who'd taught himself to move through rooms without stirring the air—which meant he'd been waiting in the corridor until I was alone. He had a tablet under one arm and the careful, neutral expression I'd learned to read over three years of working alongside him: the face he made before telling me something I wasn't going to like.

"You pulled her photographs," I said. Not a question.

"We keep copies of everything that crosses the wards." He set the tablet on the table and began laying images across its surface with quick swipes. "You know that."

"Since when do you do the filing yourself at three in the morning?"

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

The photographs spread out in a grid, and for a moment I forgot to track the woman down the hall. What Nova Hale had captured wasn't just a place where bad things had happened. It was a system.

Patient, methodical, three years of careful Council work laid bare in damning detail—the particular angle of disturbed dust that meant someone cleaned this place on a schedule, props set just slightly too perfectly to hide older stains, small wrongnesses in the wear of things that screamed staged to anyone who knew how to look.

She'd known how to look. With no training in any of this, no idea what she was standing in, she'd walked into a place the Council had spent years scrubbing and photographed exactly what they'd tried to erase.

"She read that room the way we read a scent trail," Gideon said quietly. "She didn't know what she was looking at and she still saw all of it."

I stared at the images. The warmth that moved through my chest—recognition, something like respect, something a good deal more dangerous than either—I shut it down before it could put down roots. "Three years."

"At least. Probably longer." He pulled up a second screen. "The gaps in our own files? She filled them. She photographed the exact things I've been trying to confirm since I started watching the Council's network."

The door banged open.

Jace Mercer came in without an invitation, dropped into a chair with the spare economy of motion that was the only thing about him that ever gave anything away, and gave me the look. Flat. Measuring. The one that said my wolf was showing and every man in this building with a working nose already knew it.

I didn't have to ask what he could smell. The thing that had been roaring through me since the warehouse—mate—was a scent to him, plain as a shout. Jace knew. He'd probably known before I came through the front door with her.

"Walk the perimeter," I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

"All of it. Sensors, the ward line, anything coming in from the east."

Jace held my eyes for exactly two seconds—long enough to make sure I understood he was doing this because he chose to, not because I'd told him to—and then left without a word of argument.

That was how I knew it was worse than I'd let myself count. Jace only goes quiet when he's being merciful.

Caleb Thorne arrived twelve minutes later, carrying the particular weight of a man who'd built this whole place on the belief that things go wrong fastest when you take too long to name them. The scar caught the hard light as he looked over the photographs, his face giving away nothing.

"Lucian Drake," he said at last. "The Cleaner. He was there when she took these."

"She saw him through the window on the way out." I kept my voice level. "He followed us to the edge of the wards."

Caleb's eyes came to me. "How close?"

"Close enough to know where we are. Not close enough to get in."

"Yet."

The word hung there. Everyone in this building knew Drake by reputation—ten years of vanished witnesses, every one of them clean, a man who had never once failed to finish what he was sent to do. Patient. Thorough. And now he had a name and a face, and they were hers.

"You know how this goes," Caleb said. "She saw too much. She's ours to protect until we know what we're dealing with."

"Understood."

"You've got her."

I nodded once. The assignment landed exactly where I'd known it would—I was always the one they handed the work most likely to get someone killed. That was the whole reason Caleb had built the agency around what I could do. It was why my people trusted me with their lives.