Teasing Her Alpha Guard

CHAPTER 20

Roman

I watched from the ridge as her car disappeared around the bend, and every instinct in me screamed to follow it straight through the gates instead of standing here like a ghost in the trees.

I didn't move. I made myself stand there, jaw locked, hands curled into fists at my sides, and watched the dust settle back over the road long after the convoy was gone. This was the plan. I stayed hidden. I stayed close but unseen. I let her walk into that estate alone because that was the only version of this that gave us any chance of getting ahead of Gideon before he made his next move.

Doesn't mean it didn't feel like tearing something out of my own chest.

I turned and headed back to where my truck was parked off the old logging trail, out of sight from the main road. My phone buzzed twice on the drive, both from contacts I hadn't spoken to in years, people who owed me favors from a life I'd left behind long before Lucien Argent ever signed a contract for a bodyguard. I answered the calls one after another, giving coordinates, giving instructions, setting up a covert base close enough to the Vale border that I could move fast the second something went wrong.

Dahlia still only half understood what I actually was. She knew there was more to me than the job title. She'd seen flashes of it, the fight in the hallway, the way the guards looked at me differently after the archive room. But she didn't know the full scope of the network I'd built over the years, the people scattered across territories who still answered when I called, still trusted me enough to move on my word alone. Some debts I'd earned. Some I'd been owed since before I ever took this job.

By the time the sun dropped low over unfamiliar terrain, I had a small operation running out of an abandoned hunting cabin two miles from the Vale estate's outer fence line. Not much. A cot, a table, a bank of monitors one of my contacts had rigged up in under an hour. Enough to watch and wait.

Morgan called just as I finished setting up the last camera feed.

"Tell me you have something good," I said.

"I wish I did." His voice was tight, strained. "Gideon brought in outside muscle. A group called The Collective."

I went still. "The Collective."

"You know them?"

"I know of them." My stomach twisted. The Collective wasn't some rag tag group of hired thugs. They were a syndicate, mercenaries who worked for whoever paid the most and asked the fewest questions, rogue wolves who'd cut ties with every pack that would have them and built something colder in its place. If Gideon had brought them in to lock down the estate's perimeter, that meant Dahlia wasn't just walking into danger from Adrian and his father anymore. She was walking into a fortress.

"There's more," Morgan said, and something in his tone made my chest tighten before he even said it.

"What."

"They've been tracking movements outside the estate too. Watching people connected to you." He paused. "Roman, they've had eyes on Isabelle."

The words hit like a fist to the sternum. I gripped the edge of the table hard enough that the wood creaked under my hand.

"Since when?"

"I don't know exactly. Days, maybe longer. It came up in a message thread I intercepted last night. Someone flagged her as a potential asset if things with you go sideways."

An asset. My baby sister, reduced to a line item in some mercenary's contingency plan, leverage waiting to be used the moment my cover cracked.

"I have to warn her," I said, already reaching for my phone.

"Roman, if you contact her directly and they're watching her communications too."

"I know how to send a message that doesn't get flagged." I was already typing, fingers moving fast over the coded phrasing we'd used since we were kids, back when our own father had enemies and we'd learned early how to talk in riddles that meant nothing to anyone but us. Aunt Ruth's roses need watering. Go stay with her a while. It sounded like nothing. It meant get somewhere safe and don't tell anyone where.

I hit send and stared at the screen, waiting for the three dots that meant she was typing back.

Nothing came.

I told myself it didn't mean anything. She could be asleep. Her phone could be charging in another room. A hundred harmless explanations existed, and I ran through every single one of them twice while the minutes stretched out longer than they should have.

I didn't let it show, not to Morgan, still on the line asking if I was still there, not to myself even, not really. I kept my voice level when I finally spoke again.

"Keep digging on The Collective's movements. I want positions, numbers, anything you can get without blowing your cover."

"On it."

I hung up and sat alone in that cabin as the last light faded outside the window, the monitors casting a pale blue glow across the room, and let myself feel it for exactly thirty seconds, the fear clawing up my throat at the thought of Isabelle out there unprotected while I was two hundred miles away chasing shadows around a stranger's estate.

Then I shoved it down. Panic didn't help anyone. Not Isabelle. Not Dahlia. I needed my head clear.

My phone buzzed again just as the last of the light dropped below the tree line.

Dahlia.

I have arrived, settled in. All quiet.

Short. Controlled. Exactly the way we'd planned it, a message with nothing in it that would raise suspicion if anyone else ever saw her phone. I read it twice, some of the tension in my shoulders easing slightly knowing she'd made it inside without incident, at least for now.

I typed back fast. Stay careful, I'm close.

I set the phone down and rubbed both hands down my face, exhaustion finally catching up to me after a day that felt like it had lasted a week. I thought about Isabelle again, about the roses message still sitting unanswered, and forced myself to trust that she'd see it soon, that she was fine, that this was just bad timing and nothing worse.

The phone buzzed again almost immediately.

I grabbed it fast, expecting Morgan, expecting Isabelle finally responding.

It was Dahlia. A second message, seconds after the first, nothing about it planned or rehearsed the way the last one had been.

Someone named Serena just arrived. The staff won't say her name above a whisper.

I sat frozen, staring at the screen, that single name landing somewhere deep in my gut like a stone dropped into still water.

Serena.

The conjurer. The one who'd forged the bond between me and Dahlia in the first place, keyed to her bloodline, built to be broken the second Gideon decided he no longer needed me useful. If she was walking into that estate now, tonight, it meant Gideon wasn't just watching and waiting anymore.

It meant he was ready to move.

And Dahlia was already inside those walls, completely alone, with no idea what that name walking through the front doors was actually capable of.