Page 31 of Claimed By The Tracker

She slipped into sleep with the bond settled warm under her sternum and my arm heavy across her waist. I didn't sleep. The wolf had no intention of standing down with the woman it had chosen finally close enough to guard the way it wanted to, and there was an animal satisfaction in being exactly where I was supposed to be.

I watched the dark ceiling and let the timeline run: Voss's notice, Gideon's forty-eight hours, the counter-document with her blood in its seal. The bond didn't solve any of it.

But for the first time since the diner, solving it felt like something I believed I could do.

Before dawn I eased out without waking her and went back to the porch. Not for distance—because the perimeter needed eyes, and I was still a tracker, still the wolf they sent when something needed keeping safe.

The sky had gone the grey-blue that comes before light. My wolf was quieter than it had been since Asheville—not because the bond had dimmed it but because proximity and honesty and choice had taken the worst of the pressure off. It would be complicated in daylight, I knew. In front of Roan. In briefings.

I found I didn't much care.

Maddox came to the porch door at first light, his face already carrying the weight of something he'd checked twice.

"There's a second set of tracks," he said. "North side, back behind the tree line where the wards don't reach past the old fence post. Not the same scout—different weight, different interval. Stationed, not moving."

I was already up.

"Someone watched the house last night. Didn't approach. Didn't trip anything." His jaw tightened. "They counted windows."

"What else?"

"Whoever it was left something in the bark of the oak at the property corner. Carved, not placed. Like they wanted it found after they were gone."

He held up his phone. The photo came clear in the early light: a ward notation cut into weathered bark. Old. Specific. The kind Tara would know on sight.

And at its center, a small crescent—matched, exactly, to the place on Lena's shoulder where a claiming mark would go.

Something lurched in my chest—the bond, wide open since last night, carrying my reaction to the carving straight down the line before I thought to guard it. I felt it land on her end even at this distance. A jolt sharp enough that if she was sleeping light, she wouldn't stay that way.

I didn't try to pull it back. There wasn't time, and some part of the wolf wanted her warned, even through sleep, even before I found the words to tell her myself.

Chapter 9

What Gideon Found

LENA

The morning carried an altered weight—not lighter exactly, but differently distributed, like I had shifted something from one hand to the other and my balance was still adjusting.

I'd surfaced out of sleep once already, hours before the actual waking—a jolt that wasn't mine, sharp and wordless, gone before I could grab hold of it. The bond did that sometimes now: carried the shape of what Jace felt without the context, so I woke with an image already sitting behind my eyes and no memory of being told it.

The carved crescent was the first thing I thought of when I woke. Maddox had found it at first light: a ward notation cut into the oak at the property corner, and at its center a small crescent that matched the place on my shoulder where Jace had pressed his mouth a few hours before. Someone had stood at the edge of the wards last night, counted our windows, and left a mark that said I know what she is in a language only the people in this house could read. I hadn't slept much after that. The knowledge sat under everything else now, a cold current beneath the warmth of the night before.

I was at the kitchen table by seven, coffee already in my hands because sleep had become a negotiation I was losing. Tara was there too, a hand-drawn floor plan of the farmhouse spread between our cups, the anchor points marked in red ink with the precise notations of someone who treated magic as a discipline rather than a gift. The woodsmoke smell had settled into my hair sometime in the last few days. I hadn't noticed until now how much I'd stopped minding it.

"Press here," Tara said, pointing to the first red mark without preamble. No good morning. No how did you sleep. I was learning this was her version of respect—she assumed I could handle directness because she'd decided I was worth teaching.

I set my coffee down and placed my palm flat against the floor where she'd indicated.

The sensation was immediate and strange—not the panic-surge that had thrown Jace against a car door, not the fury-crackle that'd lit up my hands when Gideon read the contract terms. This was directed. My gold magic rose from my palm in a controlled stream and fed into the ward line beneath the floorboards like water finding a channel. The farmhouse's protective architecture answered me, a faint vibration in my back teeth that said recognized.

"Hold it," Tara said quietly.

I held it.

Ten seconds. My power felt steady, present, like something that'd been waiting its whole life for permission to work this way.

Twenty seconds. The anchor was glowing, my signature weaving through its structure.