Teasing Her Alpha Guard

CHAPTER 16

Roman

I felt heard her feet slapping against stone like she'd forgotten how to breathe while running.

I was leaning against the wall of the main pack house, exhaustion finally catching up to me after a long stretch of routine perimeter checks. My mind kept drifting back to the burner phone and the look on Dahlia's face when she threw me out of her room, to the silence that had been between us for days now. Then I heard footsteps that weren't slow or hesitant at all, and I looked up to find Dahlia running toward me, her legs barely touching the ground.

After days of ghosting me, that was the last thing I expected.

"Roman." She stopped in front of me, chest heaving with words tumbling out too fast "Cassian, the archive room, he's, I don't know, something's wrong."

"Calm down." I straightened off the wall, my hands finding her shoulders without thinking about it. "Slow down so I can actually hear you."

She swallowed hard, forcing herself to breathe. "Cassian is in trouble. I called him a few minutes ago and he just went silent. Mid sentence, Roman. Something is wrong. I know it."

I didn't waste another second asking questions. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along behind me, moving fast toward the archive wing. She felt weightless next to me, like fear had stripped every ounce of resistance out of her, and for once she didn't fight my grip or try to keep her distance the way she'd been doing since the phone incident.

The archive room door was hanging wide open when we got there.

My nose caught a thick, sharp stench of blood hanging in the air before my eyes even saw it. It was fresh, like it had been let loose only minutes ago. I felt Dahlia go rigid beside me and knew she'd caught the same scent, her wolf reacting even faster than her human mind could process it.

"Cassian!" Her voice cracked as she pushed past me into the room.

The shelves had collapsed, files and documents scattered everywhere across the floor like a storm had torn through the place. Blood sprayed dark across the tile explained the smell. My eyes swept the wreckage fast, taking in everything, until I caught a piece of fabric poking out from beneath a fallen shelf.

"Help me lift this," I said, already crouched and gripping the edge.

Dahlia had her hands on it before I even finished the sentence. We heaved it up together, and what we found underneath made my stomach turn. Cassian looked more like a broken branch than a person, his neck bent at an angle that made my chest tighten, an ugly gash cutting across his hairline.

I scanned the room again fast. The ledger they'd told me about wasn't there. Only a single scrap of it, torn and half burned, caught beneath the debris.

"Cassian." I called his name, sharp and firm but he didn't respond.

I turned to Dahlia, who stood frozen, eyes glassy with hands hovering over her brother like she was terrified to touch him.

"He's out cold," I told her, keeping my voice level even though nothing about this felt level. She pressed a hand to her head and swayed slightly.

I didn't have time to comfort her yet. "You two, get over here." I called out to a pair of guards passing the corridor. "Go get me a bandage, cloth, anything."

One of them took off running while I got Cassian's head propped carefully against my knee, checking his pulse, his breathing and the angle of his neck for any sign it was worse than it looked. The bandage arrived a few minutes later, and I pressed it firmly against the gash to slow the bleeding while we waited on the healer.

Dahlia still hadn't moved. Glassy eyed, arms wrapped around herself.

I noticed something shift in the guards standing around us too. The way they looked at me had changed in the space of a few minutes, like today I'd stopped being Dahlia's hired bodyguard and turned into something else entirely in their eyes. I didn't have time to think about what that meant right now either.

I finished securing the bandage and looked up to check on Dahlia again.

She wasn't there.

"Not again." I muttered under my breath and got up fast, stepping outside into the corridor.

She was pressed against the wall a few feet away, shaking.

"Dahlia. Are you alright?" I kept my distance at first, not wanting to crowd her, not after everything that had happened between us this past week.

"No. No, this is bad." She shook her head fast, arms wrapped tighter around herself, and I could see her whole body trembling from where I stood.

"You'll be fine," I said, and this time I closed the distance, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and then fully around her back.

For two full minutes, she didn't push me away.

That mattered more than I wanted to admit.

Cassian needed emergency surgery. The healer confirmed it the moment she arrived, something about internal damage they couldn't risk waiting on, and everything after that turned into fast, controlled chaos. Dahlia climbed into the transport with him, gripping his hand the whole way, guards flanking the vehicle as it pulled off toward the medical wing.

I didn't join them.

Someone had to secure the archive room before curious eyes trampled through whatever evidence might still be sitting in that mess. That was the reason I gave myself, at least. It wasn't the whole truth, but it was the part I could say out loud if anyone asked.

I walked back towards my room, turning the torn piece of ledger over in my hand. I hadn't really had the time to look at it properly back there, not with Cassian bleeding out under a collapsed shelf and Dahlia breaking down beside me. Now, alone in the quiet hallway, I finally let myself read it.

A payment, a date and a name scrawled beside one of the transactions.

I stopped walking.

I read it again, slower, certain I'd gotten it wrong the first time.

I hadn't gotten it wrong.

It was another name and I clearly believed this one was connected to me.

It had nothing to do with the contract that had brought me to the Argent pack in the first place. This name reached back further than that, into a part of my life I'd buried a long time ago and never planned on digging back up.

My hand tightened around the scrap of paper, and for the first time since I'd taken this job, I felt something colder than fear settle into my chest.

Whoever was funding the attempts on Dahlia's life hadn't just been working with Marcus.

They'd reached straight into my past to do it and that meant this had never only been about Dahlia.