Page 34 of Claimed By The Tracker

Lena explained Delaney without interruption, which was the most respect I'd seen Roan give anyone since I arrived.

"My sister," she said. Her voice was flat and precise—the voice she used when facts were easier to hold than what she felt about them. "The person whose car I borrowed to run. She's my only real tether to the life I left. Not supernatural, not contracted. Just loyal in the way that makes people dangerous without meaning to be."

Gideon pulled up the agency's file on Delaney Rowe in under four minutes, his fingers moving with the unhurried efficiency of a man who'd done this a thousand times and knew which doors to open first.

"No supernatural affiliations," he said. "No contract ties of her own. Currently under visible pressure from Gabriel Rowe's household since the wedding morning. Phone traffic spiking in the forty-eight hours after your disappearance."

Roan asked the question I would've. "Could she be the source of the north-side surveillance?"

Lena said no—not deliberately—and then kept going, because she'd been running this calculation longer than any of us.

"My father knows who Delaney is to me. He knows she loves me, and he knows exactly how to apply pressure to a person through that love until information moves without ever being handed over." She crossed her arms—not defensive, protective. Holding something in.

"Delaney wouldn't give them a location on purpose. But if my father's calling everyone, Delaney's the one he calls hardest, because leverage works better when you don't have to explain what you're doing."

The room went quiet.

I watched her sit with that assessment of her own sister—the cost of saying it out loud, of naming the mechanism while the person it named was someone she'd rather shield. Her chin stayed up. Her voice stayed level. Her magic pulsed once, slow, at her knuckles and went still, and I felt the pulse come through the bond like a ripple across standing water.

Grief. Contained and functional.

I wanted to cross the room. I stayed where I was, because she hadn't asked me to.

Gideon said the data transfer was likely already underway. "If Delaney has regional location data—even imprecise, even just a city name—and Voss's people are applying pressure through Gabriel's household, the window between Delaney knows something and Voss's network knows something isn't measured in days."

Tara, from the table: "It may have already closed."

"Delaney wouldn't give them a location on purpose," Lena said again.

I said it because I'd tracked enough leveraged people to know the difference between betrayal and love turned into a lever: "She wouldn't need to do it on purpose."

Lena closed her eyes for exactly one second.

When she opened them, she was already nodding.

Roan made the call, his voice carrying the force of a man who'd made this decision before and knew the shape of its consequences. "Controlled response through the burner. Enough to confirm you're alive, enough to warn her not to give anyone anything further—not a region, not a direction, not a timeline. Three sentences. I review it before you send."

Lena drafted it at the table with Gideon watching the word choice, Roan watching the door, and Tara watching Lena.

Safe. Cannot say where. I love you. Give nothing.

When it sent, she set the phone face-down and didn't look at it again.

The farmhouse settled back into its waiting, but the waiting had changed quality. There was a threshold feeling in it now—a clock everyone could hear and no one could slow.

I went to the kitchen window and ran the same math I'd been running since Gideon confirmed Voss's acceleration notice: the counter-filing window, one contractor already positioned in Knoxville, the second set of north-side tracks still unexplained, and now a burner number that should've been clean reaching Delaney Rowe's phone through channels that shouldn't exist.

I didn't like the math. I ran it again and liked it no better.

I went to find Lena.

She was in the kitchen doorway—the same spot she'd stood the morning after the contract reading, leaning into the frame with her arms crossed and her weight on one hip, looking at nothing in particular with an expression working hard to pass for calm.

I stopped next to her. Not across the room. Not at a distance. Next to her—close enough that her scent was in every breath and my wolf was doing the slow, insistent thing it did in her proximity that I'd mostly stopped fighting.

She looked over when I stopped. Not surprised I'd come.

"She's already talked to someone, hasn't she."