Page 33 of Claimed By The Tracker

Through it, I could feel Jace downstairs. His attention split between the perimeter and something nearer—watchful, alert, not alarmed. I was learning the texture of him through this thing between us, the way his focus came through as pressure or warmth or the quiet of both. Right now he felt steady. I let that settle into me alongside the rest.

The afternoon passed in the rhythm of people waiting for something to move. Two more ward lessons with Tara, my gold growing more precise with each anchor, the connection between my power and the farmhouse's defenses tightening into something that was almost conversation. Gideon monitored his channels. Maddox made food. Jace ran the property line twice, and I tracked him through the bond without trying to—knew the moment he reached the eastern trees, knew the moment he turned back.

At four o'clock I stood at the kitchen window looking at that same tree line. The carving on the oak sat at the back of my mind like a stone in a shoe. Someone knew my mark. Cut it into bark. Left it where the wards didn't reach, and walked away before anyone could ask them why. I still couldn't make it mean any one thing, so I let it go on meaning all of them at once.

My phone—the burner Maddox had given me, the number known to no one outside this house—buzzed once on the counter beside me.

The number was unknown.

The text was eleven words: I know you're near Knoxville. I'm sorry. Please call me.—Delaney.

I read it twice.

My magic flared gold at my fingertips before I could stop it—not from fear, but from the complicated ache of someone I loved turning out to be proof that the walls I'd believed were solid had a breach I hadn't built and couldn't account for.

Delaney had my burner number.

Delaney knew the region.

And Delaney was apologizing before I'd asked her a single question—which meant whatever my sister had done, she already knew it was wrong.

Chapter 10

The Conduit

JACE

The farmhouse had a particular quality late at night—woodsmoke settled into the walls, old wards humming at frequencies only my wolf could feel, the stillness of a building full of people running the same calculations privately.

Maddox had reinforced something near the eastern door an hour ago, and I could still feel it in my back teeth like a tuning fork struck wrong. Tara was at the kitchen table with her notes in precise piles, not looking up when I passed, which was her way of acknowledging I was there.

I was in the downstairs hall when Lena found me.

Barefoot on the wooden floor. The burner phone in her hand, screen lit, Delaney's text open where the glow of it caught in her eyes. She'd come straight to me with it—hadn't sat on it, hadn't tried to carry it alone for even an hour. Four days ago she would have. That she didn't now landed somewhere in my chest before I'd read a word.

I read her face before I read the message.

Not quite fear. Not quite hope. Something more complicated than either—the look of a person who'd been bracing for a specific kind of damage and had just seen it confirmed. Her magic was doing something at the edge of the bond, a slow controlled pulse I felt in my chest like a second heartbeat running just out of sync with my own. Contained. Barely.

I took the phone from her hand without asking.

Eleven words: I know you're near Knoxville. I'm sorry. Please call me.—Delaney.

I read them twice. The weight of them landed the same moment I felt her magic pulse again—grief, I understood. Grief that'd learned to be functional because it couldn't afford to be anything else.

I handed the phone back.

"We loop Roan and Gideon in before you respond."

"I know." She said it like it cost her—like the knowing was the worst part, because it meant she'd already run the calculation and arrived where I had and was hoping I might hand her a different answer.

I didn't.

I walked her into the main room and put two fingers against Roan's door on the way past, because this wasn't a decision for the hallway.

The briefing came together in under three minutes. Roan was already up, reading in the small room he'd claimed; he didn't need the protocol re-explained—he'd set its limits himself the afternoon before, and now he was just adding the next problem to a board he was already holding.

Gideon materialized from wherever Gideon went when he wasn't at his laptop. Tara set her notes aside with the focused attention of someone who'd been waiting for the next thing to break.