Page 47 of Claimed By The Tracker

He laughed—a real one this time—and for a moment he just looked at me, gold-eyed and open, one hand rising to trace the line of my jaw like he was memorizing it against the possibility of bad hours ahead.

"When they come," he said quietly, "you don't leave my sight. Not because you can't fight. Because my wolf watches better when he knows where you are. Give him that and he'll give you everything else."

"Deal," I said. "Same terms."

Something eased in him. The predator readiness didn't leave—it wouldn't leave until this was finished—but it settled into place around me instead of in front of me. Beside. Where a partner stands.

He went back to the table. I went back to the window. And the bond stayed lit between us all morning like a second heartbeat saying: when they come, I'm with you.

The truth was simple and fierce: we were ready.

And if Voss came tonight or tomorrow, the farmhouse would teach him exactly what happened when you tried to take someone who'd finally learned to fight back.

Chapter 15

The Second Set of Tracks

JACE

The bond woke me before the sun did.

Not pain—pressure. A wrongness that had nothing to do with threat and everything to do with proximity, with the way Lena's presence had become a fixed point in my chest over the last four days. She was awake. She was moving. And underneath both of those, faint but unmistakable even through two closed doors, I caught her scent—coffee and cold air and something underneath both that was just hers, sharpened now with a thread of nerves she didn't want me to smell.

I found her in Maddox's kitchen before six, Gideon's intelligence printouts spread across the table, coffee going cold at her elbow. The gray light through the window made her look sharper than she had yesterday—more angles, less softness, like fear had stripped something away overnight and left only the essential of who she was.

She didn't look up when I stopped in the doorway. "Voss filed a competing claim."

"I know." Gideon's alert came in the small hours. I read it at the upstairs window while she slept, and I could smell her even from there—that same thread of nerves running under the coffee smell of the kitchen now, stronger up close.

"He's not trying to win." Her voice was even. Too even. "He's trying to make the case undecidable. Stall the review long enough to execute the activation."

"How long is 'long enough'?" I crossed the kitchen and took the chair across from her, close enough to reach but not close enough to crowd. The bond hummed between us—not demanding, not loud. Just present. My wolf was doing the slow, insistent thing it did in her proximity, tracking her scent under the coffee and the cold morning air like it was cataloguing something it meant to defend.

"Ask Tara. She read the filing before I did."

Tara appeared in the doorway on cue, dark hair pulled back, carrying the clinical focus she brought to everything. "The Ashwood acquisition clause predates his contract by two generations. He's arguing it gives the Council superior authority over the charter review itself."

"Which means the legal route alone won't hold him," Lena said. "Not if he executes before the review subgroup rules."

"Correct," Tara said. "The competing claim creates procedural grounds for a stay. We're looking at weeks, not days."

"Weeks he doesn't need if he's not planning to wait for the ruling," I said.

"That's the read," Tara said, and left it there, which told me she didn't like it any more than I did.

Lena stood. Her magic was visible at her knuckles—gold threads running under the skin, not discharged but present. Pressing. The scent of it hit me a beat later, something like ozone and hot metal riding under everything else, and my wolf came forward so fast I felt my jaw tighten against it, felt the gold trying to surface at the edges of my vision before I pushed it back down. Not now. Not yet.

"Then I'm going for a walk," she said.

"The eastern property line." Not a question. I was already standing.

"The invocation buildup is getting worse. I can feel it in my chest like something that needs to move."

"How bad?"

"Bad enough that if I don't discharge some of it soon, it's going to start acting without my permission."

"I'm coming with you."