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Her stomach turned as she said it. She knew this because she’d been living it. The notes under her door. The claw mark on the frame. Proof, every time, that the walls she hid behind meant nothing to the man who’d built the fear those walls were made of.

“Why?” Kahn asked. His voice had dropped.

“Because the point was never the attack. The point is making sure I know he can reach me whenever he wants.”

The table absorbed it. Kahn looked at Viktor. Viktor looked at the map. Caitlynn looked at Sloane with an expression that had shifted from measuring to something Sloane couldn’t read without flinching.

“We adjust,” Kahn said. “Viktor, I want the eastern block hardened. Separate the residential wards from the perimeter network. Caitlynn, can you anchor a localized matrix that holds independent of weather conditions?”

“If I draw from a different source, yes. It’ll take time. I’ll need to rewrite the anchor configuration.”

“Do it. Chris, I want a counter-surveillance detail on the eastern approach starting tonight. Not patrol. Static positions. I want to see him before he sees us.”

Chris nodded. His eyes hadn’t left Sloane.

“Thursday night,” Kahn said. “If he moves, we’ll be ready. But we plan for the possibility that Thursday is another test. Sloane.”

She looked at him.

“Stay in this room.” He said it evenly, without emphasis, the instruction of an Alpha who had decided her presence was operational rather than optional. “I need your assessment on an ongoing basis. You know his patterns. Nobody else here does.”

Her throat was tight. She swallowed against it. “Understood.”

Gideon’s chair scraped as he stood. He left without speaking, his patrol reports tucked under one arm, his back straight. Damian followed, clapping Viktor on the shoulder as he passed. Olivia murmured to Caitlynn, and the two of them moved toward the door together, their voices low.

Kahn gathered his folder. Paused beside Sloane’s chair.

“Thank you,” he said. Quiet. Direct. Then he was gone.

The room emptied around her. She stayed in her seat, her palms still flat on the table, her pulse loud in her ears. The map was still spread in front of her, Viktor’s circles and lines marking the compound she’d been living on the edges of for two years.

She’d just sat at a table with the inner circle and told them how her father hunted.

Her hands were shaking. She pressed them harder against the wood.

“You going to sit there all day?”

Chris leaned in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, his arms folded. He’d hung back while the others filed out. She hadn’t noticed, which irritated her, because she noticed everything.

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“About whether Gideon is going to have me removed from the compound for insubordination.”

“You weren’t insubordinate. You were right.”

She looked at him. He looked back, his expression stripped of the sarcasm he’d been wearing since they’d slept together, the sharp edge he used to keep distance between them. His eyes were blue, steady, carrying a warmth she hadn’t asked for.

“That was impressive,” he said.

The word landed wrong. Not because it was untrue but because it was sincere, offered without a joke attached, without the barbed follow-up she’d learned to expect. She didn’t know where to put sincerity. It sat in her chest, warm, unearned, pressing against a place she kept locked.

She stood. Pushed the chair in. Walked toward the door, toward him, stopping close enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes.

“Don’t do that.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Do what?”