Page 77 of Warded By His Wolf

The air changes. They feel it. Maybe not the bond itself, but the instant their Black Wolf director sees me and something inside him stops obeying. The pull begins beneath my sternum: one hard tug, then another. My body remembers before my mind can stop it: his hands on me, his voice in the dark, the low rumble that used to rise from his chest when I touched him. Four years collapse into one heartbeat.

His gaze darkens. "Tessa."

One word. Level. Controlled. Everyone else hears their director greeting a consultant. I hear the wolf.

Mine.

The word doesn't come from him. It doesn't have to. My life-weaver magic crashes into the bond, and heat unfurls beneath my ribs, sudden and intimate. I lock my knees. Do not react. Do not cross the room.

"Director Thorne." My voice, at least, still belongs to me. "Thank you for the expedited contract approval."

A muscle jumps once in his jaw. His eyes never leave mine. The sound that rises in his chest isn't quite a growl, but it isn't far off either, and he cuts it short before it can finish.

The man seated to his left breaks the silence. Six-four, broad shoulders, brilliant blue eyes, expression carved from stone.

"Roan." Caleb's voice, low. "Introductions can wait. We're already behind."

"They can." Roan doesn't sit down yet. His gaze cuts to me, assessing in a way that has nothing to do with courtesy. "Just so we're clear on the record, Ms. Wynn, your file says life-weaver. It doesn't say why the director personally expedited a contract that normally takes six weeks."

"Ask him." I hold his stare. "I only signed what was put in front of me."

Something shifts behind Roan's expression. Not approval. Close enough. "Your credentials have been verified. The briefing can proceed."

Not a welcome. A challenge. Prove you belong here. Fine. I've spent most of my life doing exactly that.

"Understood."

Roan holds my gaze a beat longer than courtesy requires. "Good. We don't have time to babysit anyone through this."

"I don't need babysitting. I need the archive schematics."

Something that might almost be respect crosses Roan's face before he buries it.

"Sit," Caleb says, before either of us can say more. "We have a containment failure in the lower archive requiring immediate assessment."

I take the empty chair three seats away from him. Far enough to be professional. Not far enough to stop feeling him.

The briefing lasts forty minutes. Infrastructure decay. Anchor instability. The backup containment system failing right along with the primary. Technical language built to make a crisis sound manageable. It isn't.

"Ward integrity is holding at sixty percent," the intelligence operative says, ash-brown hair, steel-gray eyes, no wasted syllables. "Trending down. We don't have a clean cause yet."

"You don't have a clean cause because you're not looking at the right system," I say, before I've decided whether it's my place to say it.

Every head at the table turns.

"Explain," Caleb says. Not a challenge. An order that sounds almost like relief.

"You're tracking ward integrity like it's failing on its own. It isn't. Something's compensating for it in real time, which is the only reason it hasn't already collapsed." I don't look at Caleb when I say it. I don't have to. "Find what's compensating, and you'll find where the real damage is."

The intelligence operative's eyes narrow, recalculating. "Noted," he says, and writes something down.

While the others talk, I let my senses move through the bones of the building, and the deeper I read, the colder I become. The decay isn't natural. Someone has been cutting the system apart with precision. And every time it fails, Caleb compensates. With himself.

"You're certain it's not organic decay?" the intelligence operative asks, watching me now instead of his tablet.

"I'm certain." I hold his gaze. "Organic decay is messy. This is surgical. Someone wants it to look like age."

"Gideon," Caleb says, and I file the name away, "cross-reference the timeline against personnel access."