Page 35 of Claimed By The Tracker

Not a question.

"Probably." I kept my voice even; she didn't need my anger stacked on top of her own. "Not because she meant to."

She nodded once—sharp, small, the nod of someone confirming a thing they already knew. She didn't cry. She recrossed her arms tighter, and I caught the small flare of gold at her fingertips that meant her magic was moving under the surface, and I watched her draw it back down with the same deliberate control Tara had been drilling into her for two days.

"Then we have less time than Gideon's estimate."

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long moment. Not asking for reassurance. Not asking for strategy. Something more particular than either.

"You're still here," she said.

"Yes."

"After all of it. The complexity I brought to your work. The bond you didn't ask for. The political disaster about to land on the agency because of my bloodline."

"Yes."

She reached up and touched my jaw, her fingers warm, gold pulsing faint against my skin. "Why?"

The answer was simple. Too simple for any words that'd sound big enough. "Because you're mine."

Her breath caught. The bond flared between us—recognition, acceptance, the warmth of a thing that'd stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was.

Before she could answer, Gideon appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Laptop open. Angled toward me. Not alarmed in any performed way—Gideon didn't perform alarm—but carrying the stillness of a man with information he already knew would change the room.

"I've got outbound traffic from Gabriel Rowe's number to a Voss-network line. Forty minutes ago." Flat, precise—the voice of a man who'd learned efficiency mattered more than softness when the news was bad. "I can't pull content—encrypted channel—but the timestamp matches the window after Delaney's text."

He paused, then added with the surgical precision that was his version of emphasis: "Someone in Gabriel's household knew Delaney reached out within minutes of it happening. Which means either Delaney's phone is monitored, or there's a second source inside the household watching her."

The implication settled into the kitchen like smoke.

If Delaney's phone was being watched by Gabriel Rowe's household, then the burner response Lena had just sent—careful, reviewed, three sentences—had been read too. By Gabriel. And through Gabriel, by Voss.

Forty minutes ago.

My wolf came forward so hard behind my eyes that the gold surfaced before I could stop it. The instinct was immediate and absolute: protect, move, get her somewhere that didn't have Voss's network closing around it like a fist.

Lena, close enough to read me with the accuracy of a woman who'd learned every shift in me, said very quietly: "They know we're here."

Not a question.

I turned to face Gideon fully, jaw tight, hands flat against my thighs because if I didn't put them somewhere deliberate they were going to do something I hadn't planned.

"Timeline."

Gideon's expression didn't change. "If the outbound traffic gave them regional location data—and we have to assume it did—then Voss's contractor in Knoxville has enough to narrow the search. Maddox's property isn't public record, but it isn't invisible either. Someone with resources and motivation could find it."

"How long?"

"Hours. Maybe less."

Lena's magic flared—not a discharge, not directed, just the visible evidence of everything she was feeling crackling gold at her knuckles before she hauled it back down with a control that cost her something I could see. I felt the cost come through the bond like a physical thing.

"The counter-filing," she said. "How close is Gideon to completing it?"