Page 81 of Guarded By The Alpha

I came apart beneath him with his name in my mouth, and he followed me over the edge with mine in his.

Afterward, the bond between us was warm and complete and permanent. The mark glowed faintly in the dark of his room. His hands finally still on me.

I lay against his shoulder and felt through the connection what he was: certain, grounded, the man who stayed.

I wasn't bracing for anything.

It was the first time in thirteen years I hadn't been bracing for something.

"I'm not leaving," I said.

He pulled me closer. His heart was steady under my palm.

"I know," he said.

We stayed there in the dark, tangled together, the bond warm between us. I traced the scar on his forearm and he let me, which was itself a kind of telling.

Neither of us slept. Neither of us needed to.

Somewhere down the hall, Gideon was already three steps into the next problem. The inquiry's secondary records held a name—a title, a role—that would change everything.

But that was for later.

For now, there was only this: a man who stayed, a woman who chose to stop running, and a bond forged in warehouse dark and tempered in safe-house fire and finished in the quiet certainty of a room that finally felt like somewhere to put down.

I wasn't leaving.

I had the evidence.

Chapter 26

Guarded By the Alpha

NOVA

I woke to the bond before I woke to anything else.

It sat warm and certain in my chest—not a pull anymore, not a compass pointing at something I wasn't allowed to touch, but a settled, resident warmth that was simply part of what I carried now. Morning light came through the east-facing window in a wide band across the floor, catching dust motes that drifted lazy and unhurried through the air. Roan's arm was around me with the weight of a man who'd made a decision about what he was holding onto, even in sleep.

I lay still. I did not document this. I did not hold it at the arm's length I'd spent seven years cultivating. I let myself exist inside it—the mark aching pleasantly in the cool air, his heartbeat under my palm where my hand had found his chest sometime in the night, the particular quality of a silence that didn't need managing.

This was the first morning of eleven in which I felt the absence of the brace—the constant, low readiness for everything to shift, to go, to confirm what I'd always suspected. When I traced the mark with my fingertips, he stirred, and his arm tightened before he was fully awake. It was the most honest thing I'd ever seen him do.

"You're thinking too loud," he said against my hair, voice rough with sleep.

"I'm not thinking at all. That's the problem."

His chest moved with something that might have been a laugh. "Noted. Absence of thinking will be treated as a crisis."

I turned in the circle of his arm to face him. His eyes were still heavy-lidded, but the gold was there at the edges, catching the morning light. The wolf watching even when the man was barely awake.

"Coffee," I said.

He was up and moving before I finished the word, which was, I'd learned, the language he was most fluent in: action as care, protection as devotion. I watched him cross the room—the economy of movement, the way he checked the window and the door in a single sweep that looked like stretching—and understood with sudden clarity that I'd stopped waiting for him to disappoint me.

That was new. That was terrifying. That was exactly what I wanted.

He came back with coffee and a tablet, setting both on the nightstand. "Gideon sent this twenty minutes ago. I was hoping you'd sleep longer."