Page 17 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Because he knew I'd run the second I understood what it was."

"Yes."

"How much does he own of me?"

"On paper? Everything. Magically, financially, professionally. You're documented as his asset in the Council's institutional registry."

The words should have leveled me. Instead something in my chest went cold and clear and entirely without compromise, the way still water goes right before it freezes.

"Then we take it apart," I said. "We go to the Council and we prove I exist as something other than his paperwork. We make it impossible for him to own a person who refuses to be owned."

Tara's expression shifted—not surprise. Recognition, the look of someone who'd been waiting to see if I had that kind of fight in me and had just gotten her answer.

"It's not that simple." A pause. "But you're not wrong about the strategy."

A laptop screen turned toward us from across the kitchen. A lean man with reading glasses pushed up into his hair leaned into the doorway, computer balanced on one forearm without a second thought.

"Sorry, couldn't help overhearing the part where you volunteered for war," he said. "Gideon Cross. Intelligence. I've had eyes on your father's financial network since Jace's first check-in this morning, and I want you to know up front that your instincts are better than most of the professionals I work with."

"That's not comforting either."

"It's not meant to be. It's meant to tell you that this—" he gestured at the folder, at the house, at all of it "—is winnable. Slow, ugly, and winnable."

"How slow?"

"Depends how fast we move." Gideon's eyes flicked toward Jace, still standing in the doorway. "And how much your father's people escalate in response. Which, given the contractor spotted on I-40 this morning, I'd guess is already."

The room went very still.

"Someone followed me," I said. Not a question. Jace had told me on the road, but hearing it confirmed by someone with actual data made it real in a different way.

"Followed and turned back," Jace said from the doorway, voice even, meant to steady rather than alarm. "He's not getting a second look at you today."

"Today," Tara repeated. "Which is the whole problem, and also why we're moving fast instead of carefully. Roan wants to file the counter-petition within seventy-two hours. I want two more days to build the evidentiary chain so it doesn't fall apart in front of the Council. We're going to compromise on something that makes both of us unhappy, which historically means it's the right call."

Maddox, from somewhere near the coffee pot: "Democracy in action."

"Nobody asked you," Tara said, without looking at him, and something about the easy rhythm of it—the way none of them flinched at a threat that would have sent my father's entire staff into a silent, controlled panic—loosened something behind my ribs that had been locked tight since 6:03 that morning.

For the first time since I'd walked out of my own wedding, I let myself imagine that this might actually work.

"Okay," I said. "Tell me the whole strategy. Every piece. I want to understand exactly what I'm walking into before I walk into it."

Tara smiled—the first real one I'd seen from her—and reached for a second folder.

"Now that," she said, "I can work with."

Chapter 4

What the Contract Actually Said

JACE

I sat at the table, half-listening to Tara walk Lena through the rest of the acquisition clause, half tracking the tension coiled behind my sternum that hadn't fully unspooled since the sedan on I-40. My wolf didn't like sitting still this soon after a threat. It wanted to be at the fence line, at the tree line, at every point where her father's money could reach next.

I made myself sit still anyway. She needed a room that didn't feel like a second interrogation, and me pacing wasn't going to help that.

Tara walked her through the rest of it in plain terms this time, no jargon, the kind of careful translation she reserved for people she'd decided were worth the extra effort. The bloodline claim. The years of quiet documentation that had built Lena into something Gabriel Rowe could transfer to Voss the moment the arrangement became profitable enough. Language that read like love on the surface and read like a deed underneath, if you knew how to look.