Page 53 of Claimed By The Tracker

The gold at my palms flickered and died. I looked at it like it belonged to someone else—like the power that had held wards against force and pressure an hour ago was suddenly not enough against paperwork and precedent and a father who'd spent thirty years learning how to make concern look like control.

Jace's voice came quiet and certain. "You're not facing this alone."

I looked at him. He was sitting very still, his jaw tight, his eyes bright gold at the edges—the wolf fully present and not bothering to hide it anymore. Something in the bond went low and steady, an animal kind of promise underneath the human one, and my body recognized both at once.

"He's going to use every tool he has," I said. "Every connection. Every year of practice at making things look different than they are."

"Yes," Jace said. "And you're going to testify that you're stable because you've survived nine years carrying a secret that would've broken most people. You're going to walk into that hearing with your head up and your power visible, and you're going to let them see exactly who you are—not the performance, not the managed version. The real one. And they're going to have to contend with that."

"Nine years," I repeated, and something in my chest settled at the number the way it hadn't at seven, at eight, at any of the smaller lies I'd told myself about how long I'd been alone in it. Nine years was the truth. It felt strange to hear it out loud in a Council document context, like even the number belonged to me now instead of to whatever version of my history my father wanted the Council to believe.

I looked at Tara. "Can we win this?"

"The evaluation?" She considered it with the precision she brought to every tactical problem. "Probably. You're coherent, intelligent, thinking clearly under real pressure. Any competent examiner will find you stable."

"But?" I could hear the but in her voice.

"But Gabriel knows that too. Which means he's not trying to win the evaluation. He's trying to delay. Every hearing, every petition, every procedural step buys Voss more time."

Roan set the Council document on the table. His blue eyes were steady, assessing, carrying the weight of someone used to making decisions when all the terrain looked wrong.

"Then we don't play their timeline," he said. "We accelerate ours. Gideon—can you request an emergency hearing based on the stability testimony and the ward-holding evidence?"

"Today?"

"Today."

Gideon was already typing. "Forty-eight hours, maximum. The Council moves faster on emergency motions because the alternative is institutional liability they can't afford."

"And the evaluation?" I asked.

"We request it happen before the hearing," Roan said. "Not after. Make them respond to our timeline instead of theirs. You get evaluated tomorrow, we have the results by day two, we enter them as evidence at the hearing."

It was a good strategy. It was also terrifying in ways paperwork and politics didn't usually manage to be. It meant walking into a room with strangers and letting them assess my mental fitness. It meant my father would use that assessment as ammunition regardless of the result. It meant every moment of the last nine years—every decision to hide, every choice to survive, every tactical calculation I'd made in the dark—would become evidence in someone else's judgment of my sanity.

"All right," I said.

Jace was beside me before I'd finished the word. His hand came up and rested on my shoulder, warm through my shirt, saying without words what he wasn't ready to say out loud yet.

"When this is over," I said, "we're going to have a serious conversation about the bond."

"I know."

"And about marking. What it means, exactly, when you're ready to talk about it."

He went very quiet, and through the bond I felt something shift—something held in restraint for days finally finding language, the wolf going still and attentive under his skin like it had heard its name.

"I know," he said again, and this time his hand tightened on my shoulder just enough that I felt it in the mark itself, a promise with no words yet, but not for lack of wanting them.

The kitchen had emptied by then—Roan and Gideon gone to draft the counter-petition, Tara upstairs pulling precedent for the emergency motion. It was just the two of us and the last of the evening light through the window, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

"You didn't have to say nine years like that," I told him. "Like it was a fact instead of a wound."

"It's both," Jace said. "But you don't get to decide it's only a wound. Not anymore. Nine years is also how long you survived something that should have broken you and didn't. I wanted you to hear both parts, not just the part your father's trying to make the whole story."

I didn't have an answer for that—not one made of words. So I leaned into him instead, let my head rest against his shoulder, let the bond carry what I couldn't say out loud. His arm came around me, careful and certain, and for a few minutes the Council, the evaluation, and my father's nine years of careful silence all receded into something distant enough to breathe around.

"Tomorrow's going to be ugly," I said finally.