Page 22 of Claimed By The Tracker

"No," he said. "You're really not."

Something shifted in his expression, something that looked almost like relief, like he'd been braced for a different reaction his whole life and hadn't quite believed it wouldn't come this time either.

"Lena." My name again, rough, the way it always came out of him when he meant something too big for an ordinary voice.

"I know." I slid my hand up to rest against his jaw. "I feel it too."

He turned his head just enough to press his mouth to my palm, eyes falling shut for one unguarded second, and when he opened them again they were gold—steady, unhurried, entirely certain.

"When we walk into that hearing today," he said, "everyone in that room is going to see exactly what you are to me. I'm not hiding it. Not for procedure, not for your father, not for anyone in that Council chamber who thinks a mate bond is a liability instead of the most dangerous asset in the room."

"Good," I said. "Let them see."

I reached back and took his hand—the mark side, always the mark side lately, like my body had already decided where it belonged before the rest of me caught up.

"Then let's go," I said. "Let's go tell the Council I'm not my father's asset."

His fingers closed around mine, steady and sure.

"Let's go tell them," he said, "you're mine. By choice. Yours and mine both."

We walked down the steps together, into a morning that smelled like woodsmoke and cold grass and, underneath it, faint and gold, like magic that had finally stopped hiding.

Behind us, the farmhouse door banged open and Maddox came down the steps two at a time, truck keys already in hand, Tara close behind him clutching the folder like it was made of something more fragile than paper. Gideon brought up the rear, already talking into his phone in the clipped, efficient shorthand he used when he wanted to sound calmer than he was.

"Convoy in five," Roan called from the driveway. "Lena rides with Jace. Everyone else, you know the formation."

I looked back once at the farmhouse—two days ago a stranger's safe house, now something closer to the first real home I'd had in longer than I wanted to count—and then I climbed into the truck beside the man whose wolf had chosen me in a diner booth before either of us had said a single honest word.

Asheville was sixty miles away. My father's lawyers were already moving. The Council chamber didn't care whose daughter I was.

None of it mattered as much as it had yesterday. I had a folder, a plan, and five people who'd chosen to stand at my back instead of behind my father's signature—and beside me, a man whose hand found mine on the console without either of us having to ask.

We pulled out of the yard together, into whatever came next.

Chapter 7

The Farmhouse Learns Her

LENA

The hearing lasted eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes for Gideon to file the first challenge against my father's contract, get it entered into the Council registry, and walk back out with a stamped filing number and a review date.

No ruling. No confrontation. No Gabriel Rowe waiting across the chamber to drag me home.

Just proof that my challenge existed now—and that the real fight was still coming.

By the time we made it back to the farmhouse, I should've felt relieved.

I didn't.

The drive home had felt longer than the one out, all of us waiting for the version of today that hadn't happened yet—the one where Voss or my father answered back.

Jace went out again within the hour, restless in the way he got when a threat hadn't shown itself yet and his wolf wanted a perimeter to walk instead of a house to sit in.

The front door closed behind him.