Teasing Her Alpha Guard

CHAPTER 14

Roman

Dahlia came out of the bathroom holding a burner phone in her hand.

That was the exact moment I knew I'd f****d up.

I stared at the small black device pinched between her fingers, and everything in me went still.

"I thought you headed to your room when I left you," I said, after a silence that stretched far too long to feel natural. "How did you get in here?"

"My father owns this building, Roman." Her voice was flat, controlled in a way that scared me more than if she'd been screaming. "I can access any room I want, whenever I want."

She stepped closer, close enough that I could see the fine tremor in her hand as she held the phone up between us, waving it slightly like she wanted me to really look at it.

"Don't act like you don't know what this is."

I said nothing. There wasn't a version of this conversation where staying quiet helped me, but my mind was scrambling too fast to choose the right words and every second of silence just dug the hole deeper.

"I thought I could trust you." Her voice broke slightly on the word trust, and something in my chest cracked right along with it. "But you're doing this too. You found the phone this whole time and decided to keep it to yourself." She pressed her palm against her temple, like she was trying to hold her own head together. "Or maybe you had it all along. What was even the point of lying to me now?"

"Dahlia, sit down." I kept my voice low, steady, the same tone I used to calm frightened people in situations far worse than this one. It didn't work on her.

"I won't sit, Roman and you shouldn't either." She squared her shoulders, chin lifting, every inch of the Alpha's daughter despite the hurt bleeding through her eyes. "Stand there and tell me why the hell you have this. You're working with Marcus, aren't you?"

"No. That's not it." I held my hands up slightly, palms open, the universal sign for I'm not your enemy, even though I understood exactly why she wouldn't believe that right now. "I found the phone yesterday."

"And?"

"And you're right. I wasn't planning on giving it to you or telling you about it."

Her mouth twisted into something bitter.

"So what about what your sister said?" she pressed, moving even closer, close enough now that I could smell the faint trace of her shampoo. Her chest rose and fell too fast. "Is it true?"

There it was. The question I'd been dreading since the moment Isabelle showed up unannounced and opened her mouth without thinking about what she might be handing over.

"That too," I admitted, and the words felt like swallowing glass. "I was hired for an extraction job. That's why I came here in the first place, why I took the position as your bodyguard."

Her whole body went rigid.

"But the longer I spent with you, the more that changed." I kept going, needing her to hear all of it now that the first c***k had opened. "I was planning to protect you. The way I've been doing this whole time. That never stopped being true."

"Oh, you were planning to protect me." Her laugh came out humorless, nothing like the warm, easy sound I'd grown used to hearing from her. "That's the same as fattening a cow before slaughtering it. You don't get to call that protection, Roman."

"I'm sorry for hiding the phone from you."

"So who do you work for?" Her eyes locked onto mine daring me to lie to her one more time. "Tell me right now."

I felt my throat tighten. This was the question that could unravel everything, not just my cover, but every fragile piece of trust I'd managed to build with her over these past weeks. If I told her the truth now, before I had proof, before I could show her exactly why I'd taken the job and what I'd been planning to do with it, she might run straight to her father. And if Lucien found out before we had evidence against Marcus and whoever was really pulling the strings, it would blow apart everything we needed to keep her safe.

I gulped, and the silence that followed answered her question louder than any words could have.

"You won't tell me." It wasn't a question this time. Just confirmation of something she'd already suspected. "Okay."

She wrapped her arms around herself, and for a second I saw the exact moment something in her chest gave way.

"You know I could just walk straight to my father and tell him everything you've done," she said, voice shaking now despite her best efforts to keep it steady. "Get you kicked off this estate within the hour. You know that, right?"

"Of course." I met her eyes without flinching, because I had expected this the moment she walked out of that bathroom holding the phone. But looking at her now, the way her jaw trembled even as she tried to hold her expression together, I already knew she wasn't going to do it. Not because she owed me anything. Sme part of her, buried under all that fury and hurt, still didn't want to.

Her mouth quivered, just slightly, and I watched her fight against it with everything she had. She would rather burn this whole room down than let herself cry in front of me right now, and that broke my heart worse than if she had actually cried.

"Get the f**k out. Now, Roman."

Her voice broke on the last word and every instinct screaming inside me told me to stay and fix this somehow or find the right combination of words that would undo the damage I'd just done. But I knew better than to push her right now.

"I know how you feel right now," I said quietly, reaching over to grab my phone off the table slowly so I wouldn't spook her further. "But I will continue to protect you, that part was never a lie."

"I said get the f**k out."

I looked at her one last time. Every step away from her felt heavier than the last. I reached the doorway and paused for a second, some desperate part of me hoping she'd call out to me, maybe tell me to stop, give me one more chance to explain the parts I still hadn't said.

She didn't.

I stepped out into the hallway and shut the door quietly behind me, and the click of the lock sliding into place on the other side felt like the loudest sound I'd heard all night.