Page 85 of Guarded By The Alpha

"Am I late?" Elena asked.

I stood and turned and put my arms around her, and she smelled like the perfume she'd started wearing again three months ago, the one I remembered from before. Evidence. The most specific kind.

"Fashionably," I said into her shoulder.

She laughed. It was a sound I was still documenting every time I heard it — the particular quality of a woman relearning laughter after thirteen years of choosing silence as survival. Each time it landed differently. Each time it cost me something I was glad to spend.

We stayed until the light started changing.

The conversation moved the way conversations move inside chosen families — without agenda, without the careful management of people performing connection.

"You're citing the wrong revision," Tara said to Jace, sliding her tablet across the table. "This is the version before Gideon's notes."

"It's the version that made sense," Jace said.

"It made sense to you. That's not the same thing." But she was already pulling up the newer file for him anyway.

Maddox ate without comment and refilled everyone's water without being asked. My mother told a story about the archive work she'd started at the agency three months ago — small work, careful work, the kind that suited a woman rebuilding the shape of a self that had been in storage for over a decade — and Gideon's name came up twice in the telling, which meant he'd been three steps ahead of her filing system from day one and she'd stopped minding.

Roan's hand found mine under the table. He didn't look at me when it happened. He was listening to my mother's story with the full, patient attention he brought to things that mattered, and his hand simply moved to mine the way it always did — the before-thought gesture of a man for whom this had become the natural position.

I turned my hand under his and held on.

The mark on my shoulder was warm in the afternoon light. It was always warm now — not the sharp, seeking pulse of the early weeks, but something settled. Resident. A fact about my body the way my heartbeat was a fact.

I was not documenting from a distance. I was inside it.

That was still the most significant thing I did, every day.

We walked to the park when the café began filling with the early dinner crowd. Roan's shoulder was solid under my hand. The bond was warm and specific and pointed directly at the man beside me, the way it had been pointed at him since a warehouse sub-basement on a Tuesday night when I was supposed to leave and didn't.

"I've been thinking about the position review," I said.

He looked down at me. "And?"

"I want to widen what I document. Not just agency evidence. The bloodline files the oversight board unsealed last month — there are families in there who don't know yet what happened to their relatives. Someone needs to build the record."

He was quiet a moment. Not the quiet of resistance. The quiet of a man taking something seriously enough to hold it before he spoke.

"I'll talk to Caleb," he said.

"I already talked to Caleb."

The corner of his mouth moved again. Closer to a smile this time.

"Of course you did."

The park was quiet at this hour. The city's noise moved around us without touching us — the specific quality of two people who'd stopped performing composure for each other and were simply living in the same space inside the same life.

"When I took those first photographs in the warehouse," I said, "I was doing what I always did. Keeping everything at a distance. Treating the evidence like it belonged to someone else's story."

"And now?"

I looked at the mark on my shoulder, visible at the edge of my collar in the evening light. At the bond warm in my chest. At the man beside me who'd stood outside my door in the dark before I knew what he was to me, because his wolf had already known and had been patient enough to wait.

"Now I'm in it," I said. "That's the difference."

He stopped walking. Turned to face me with the full weight of his attention, gold at the edges of his eyes, the wolf present and watchful and entirely unconcerned with pretending otherwise.