Page 19 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Car's gone," he said. "Wasn't there long enough to be nothing, and left too clean to be an accident. I'd call it a forward look. Somebody wanted eyes on the property before deciding whether it's worth a real move."

"Which means they know where she is," Lena said.

"Means somebody suspects," Roan corrected. "There's a difference, and it's the difference that's going to keep you alive this week. We tighten the perimeter tonight. Nobody goes past the tree line alone. And we move the timeline up—I want that counter-petition filed within forty-eight hours, not seventy-two."

Tara didn't argue, which told me she'd seen the ask coming.

"Forty-eight hours," Lena repeated, and something in her voice had gone quieter, steadier. Not less afraid. Just done pretending the fear was going to leave before she needed to act anyway. "Then I want to know everything. Every piece of the plan. I'm done being the last person in the room to understand what's happening to my own life."

The room started moving again—Gideon back to his screens, Roan and Maddox already talking logistics in the doorway, low and fast. I stayed where I was, close enough to Lena that I could still feel the last of the adrenaline running through her, gold and hot under her skin.

"You didn't have to say yes back there," she said quietly, for me alone. "Standing with me. You could've stayed exactly where you were and it still would've been true."

"I know."

"Then why⁠⁠—"

"Because I wanted you to see me choose it," I said. "Not have it be a thing my wolf decided for both of us in a parking lot. I want it to be mine too."

She didn't have an answer for that. But she didn't step back either, and for the length of one held breath, that was enough.

Chapter 5

Forty-Eight Hours

LENA

By the morning of day two, the farmhouse had become something between a safe house and a war room.

Tara had commandeered every flat surface for documents. Gideon ran two laptops at once, hunting patterns in my father's financial records with the single-minded focus of a man who'd forgotten his coffee needed to be reheated. Maddox walked the perimeter every thirty minutes, rifle riding easy across his back, checking sensors that hadn't stopped chirping false alarms since the gas station sighting. Roan was on the phone with contacts I didn't know existed, voice pitched low enough that I only caught fragments—Council contact, off the record, need the room before Thursday.

And Jace was there. Sleeping downstairs on the couch, close enough to feel through the bond if anything so much as breathed wrong near the tree line. Close enough that I could sense his wolf pacing at the edges of sleep—not resting, just managing exhaustion while staying half a second from awake.

I'd tried my own bed twice that night and given up both times. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the bridal suite watching my own reflection lie to me, or back in the diner watching a stranger's eyes go gold across a formica table, or standing in a parking lot with magic crackling in my palms for the first time in twelve years. Sleep felt like something that happened to other people. People whose fathers hadn't sold them.

I found him in the kitchen at four in the morning because I couldn't sleep, and neither, apparently, could he.

He was standing at the window with a mug he hadn't drunk from, moonlight cutting across the sharp lines of his face. He didn't turn when I came in. He didn't need to.

"You're not resting," I said.

"I'm managing." His voice was rough with tiredness, low enough not to carry past the kitchen. "Wolf doesn't sleep when the mate's still in danger. Doesn't matter how many locks are on the doors."

The word landed in my chest and stayed there. Mate.

"Is that what this is?" I crossed the room, stopped an arm's length away, close enough to feel the heat coming off him. "Some kind of possessive wolf thing?"

"It's a recognition." He turned to face me fully, and his eyes were gold in the dark, steady, unhidden. "My wolf chose you the second you walked into that diner, and I've been managing the pressure of that ever since. It's not possession, Lena. It's knowing exactly who I'm supposed to stand in front of when something comes for her."

My magic stirred under my skin, reaching toward him the way it had reached in the parking lot—except this time it wasn't fury. It was something slower. Softer.

"I don't need protecting," I said.

"I know." A ghost of a smile, there and gone. "Doesn't mean you have to do it alone, though."

He said it simply, like partnership was a thing he could hand me and I could take it without paying for it later. Like I could lean on someone without the bill coming due.

I wanted to believe that. I wasn't sure I had the muscle for it yet.