Page 24 of Claimed By The Tracker

Like the Ashwood power was trying to introduce itself to the farmhouse's existing architecture.

"Your magic is testing the wards," Tara said, still not looking up.

Somehow she'd felt it from across the room.

"Is that a problem?"

"It's information." Now she looked up, dark eyes precise and interested. "Old bloodline magic is territorial. It wants to know the defensive shape of any space it occupies for long. The fact that yours is reaching without being directed means your instincts are ahead of your training."

She pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward her.

"We're going to work on that this morning."

"Now?"

"The best time to learn warding integration is before you need it."

She set a pencil on the paper between us.

"Sit down, Ms. Rowe."

I sat.

What followed was the most genuinely useful hour I had ever spent.

Tara walked me through the farmhouse's ward structure the way a structural engineer walks through load-bearing walls—not as magic, not as mystery, but as a system with logic and purpose and specific points of strength and weakness.

The anchor points were the foundation: six of them, set into the building's original timber frame.

They were placed to maximize coverage of the property's approach angles.

"Your discharge is clean," she said, watching the gold that moved from my palms when I pressed them to the first anchor. "Controlled, when you're not in survival mode. That's Ashwood precision—it runs in bloodlines that old the way perfect pitch runs in musical families. What you're missing is the structure to direct it."

"I've been hiding it for twelve years."

"And hiding it taught you exactly what happens when you don't control it."

She made a note.

"Now you need to learn what happens when you do."

She had me work through three of the six anchor points before Maddox came back inside, moving toward the coffeepot with the unhurried efficiency of a man who'd finished one task and was already on the next.

He set a plate down at my elbow without comment—eggs and toast and something herbed that smelled like care expressed through cooking—and didn't linger to be thanked.

I watched him cross back to the stove and felt something that didn't have a clean name.

The weight of being looked after by someone who expected nothing back for it.

I ate without realizing I was hungry.

When Jace came back inside, cold from the morning and moving with the controlled purpose he carried everywhere, he stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the anchor work spread across the floor between Tara and me—the faint gold lines still visible where my magic had fed into the ward structure, the brightening along the baseboards that hadn't been there before.

His jaw tightened fractionally.

His eyes tracked the ward work with the predatory precision of a man assessing a threat, and I felt it through the bond—not alarm, but the sharp focus of a wolf taking in information it needed.

When he looked at me, I caught the faint edge of gold behind his pupils before he pulled it back.