Page 37 of Claimed By The Tracker

Tara's gaze met mine across the kitchen. Something passed between us—not warmth exactly, but the recognition of one competent woman clocking another. I'd been paying attention. She'd noticed. From Tara, the noticing was the compliment.

Roan crossed his arms. "Options. We accelerate the filing or we move locations."

"Moving is preferable if we can do it inside three hours," Gideon said. "The call gave Voss a region at minimum, and his contractor already has eyes in Knoxville."

Tara shook her head. "Lena's signature is anchored to this farmhouse. Re-anchoring somewhere new takes six hours we don't have. A new location loses the defensive advantage unless I build the wardwork clean from scratch⁠⁠—"

"Which is also six hours we don't have," Gideon finished.

The strategy moved around me, and for once I wasn't standing outside it waiting to be told what it meant. I weighed each piece against what I'd learned about my own power these last days—how it answered direction, how it behaved when I gave it intent instead of fear.

"What if we don't move?"

Every head turned.

"What if we let him think the safehouse is exposed," I said, "and we use that?"

Roan's attention sharpened—not dismissal, assessment, the focus he reserved for an idea he hadn't expected from its source.

I laid it out, the pieces clicking as I spoke. "Gideon's counter-filing needs time. If Voss moves on this location before the filing completes, we lose everything. But if we make him believe he has us contained—vulnerable, a small exposed team—while Gideon finishes, we control the timeline instead of reacting to his."

The silence had weight.

"That requires you to be bait," Roan said. Level. Direct.

"That requires me to be useful," I said. "There's a difference."

Jace said nothing beside me, but I felt the shift in his body—the effort it cost him not to speak. His jaw was tight when I glanced over, his hands deliberately still on the counter's edge, knuckles pale with the effort of keeping them there. I'd learned to read that restraint: the way he made space available without taking it, never moving toward me unless I moved first. His wolf hadn't learned the same patience. I caught the faint gold ring around his iris flare and recede, flare and recede, each time the word bait passed through the room, like the animal in him kept rejecting the plan on principle and being talked down by the man. Last night hadn't changed that about him. It'd only made me certain of it.

Roan and Gideon worked the parameters with the efficiency I was coming to recognize as Pack Guard standard—not speed for its own sake, but the precise ordering of people who knew which problem to solve first.

"The contractor Voss has in Knoxville is surveillance, not extraction," Gideon confirmed. "He won't move on a warded location with a full team present without a window of vulnerability."

"If we feed the impression of a smaller team," Roan said, following it, "reduced perimeter activity, two people instead of six⁠⁠—"

"We buy the hours we need." I finished it because I could see where it landed.

Tara nodded slowly. "The wardwork holds against a standard contractor approach. It won't hold against a coordinated multi-point breach with a practitioner on Voss's side."

Maddox appeared in the doorway, and I hadn't heard him cross the yard, hadn't heard the door—he'd been listening from the porch, of course he had, with the quiet attention of a man who'd already found the logistical problem and its solution before anyone thought to ask him. "I can make this house read as two people instead of six," he said. "Signal spoofing on the perimeter sensors, staggered lights, one vehicle moved and parked to suggest fewer of us. Done it before, out west. Took a crew four hours to notice they'd been watching a puppet show."

"How long to set it up here?" Roan asked.

"Ninety minutes, if Gideon feeds me the sensor layout."

Something in me warmed at that—the quiet competence of it, the way he'd already worked the timeline out before anyone finished asking the question. He said the plan like a professional skill, unhurried, already three steps into the execution of it in his head, and something in my chest pulled toward him the way it kept doing—this man who protected people by making sure they had what they needed before they knew they needed it. If anything went wrong tonight, I'd miss him more than I had any right to, on four days' acquaintance.

The plan set itself.

My role was to be visible. The kitchen window with the overhead light on. The porch at intervals with a coffee cup in my hands. The performance of a woman who believed herself more hidden than she was, who didn't yet know her location had been traded.

Jace stayed inside with me. He didn't argue it with Roan. That he didn't argue told me everything about what the bond was doing to his priorities.

After Maddox left and the house settled to four people, I climbed the stairs again. Not to the window this time—to the doorway of the upstairs room where Jace stood with his back to the frame, watching the dark.

I didn't smile. I didn't armor up. I let him see me as I was: tired and furious and present, the woman who'd run from a wedding dress at dawn and somehow ended up here, in a Tennessee farmhouse with a wolf's hand at her back and gold magic crackling under her skin.

"He's going to keep coming," I said. "Voss. It won't stop until the filing completes or we stop him directly."