Page 54 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Tomorrow you're going to walk in there and make them regret underestimating you." His mouth brushed my temple, warm and brief. "Tonight, you get to just be tired. I've got you until then."

It wasn't a fix. It wasn't even a plan beyond the one Roan had already built. But it was enough to let me close my eyes for a moment against his shoulder and believe, for the length of that breath, that I wasn't walking into tomorrow alone.

Chapter 18

Some Things You Didn't File

JACE

The psychological evaluation took three hours.

I sat in the waiting room and worked a loose thread on my jacket cuff while a woman named Dr. Okafor spent her morning with Lena, asking questions about her childhood and her fear responses and the twelve years she'd spent hiding something she wasn't supposed to hide in a world that'd decided her autonomy wasn't hers to give away.

My wolf paced under my skin. Every minute of those three hours cost something, some small reservation of control I had to spend to keep from moving, to keep from finding Lena and extracting her from a process that felt wrong not because it was dangerous but because it was designed to question exactly what I'd spent the last week protecting. The waiting room smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and old coffee, nothing that gave me anything useful to track, and that absence of information was its own kind of torment.

Gideon sat beside me with his laptop and his endless patience, running secondary threads on Council precedent for emergency hearings. Tara was in the room with Lena—allowed as a "character witness," which meant allowed because Roan had made enough calls to enough people to ensure they couldn't refuse without drawing scrutiny.

Twice in the first hour I caught myself standing, halfway to the door before some more rational part of me reasserted control. Gideon didn't look up either time. He just said, "She's fine," in the same even, certain way he said anything he'd already run the odds on, and I sat back down because arguing with Gideon's odds had never once worked out for me.

The second hour was worse. The bond was quiet in a way that unsettled me more than distress would have—not silence exactly, just Lena holding herself carefully, giving away as little as she could to whoever was on the other side of that door. I recognized the shape of it. It was the same control she'd used for twelve years to keep her magic hidden, turned now toward keeping her fear hidden instead. I wanted to tell her she didn't have to do that with me. I couldn't, not through a wall, not with three hours left to go.

At three hours and forty-two minutes, the office door opened and I caught Lena's scent first—faint under the door, tired and strained but not afraid, which told me more than anything Dr. Okafor was about to say.

Dr. Okafor appeared in the doorway.

She was clinical and precise and carried a trained neutrality, the look of someone who'd spent a career learning to see people without letting what she saw bias her judgment. She looked at me like she'd been studying me the whole time—not just Lena, but the bond, the way I was sitting, the way my jaw was clenched, the gold I'd stopped bothering to hide at the edges of my vision.

"I'd like to speak with Mr. Mercer," she said to Gideon, not to me.

My wolf came forward so fast I felt my hands tighten on the chair arms, felt the low pull in my chest that wanted this conversation to happen anywhere but a beige office with a closed door between me and Lena.

"I'll pass," I said.

She raised an eyebrow. "The evaluation is about Ms. Rowe's stability. Part of that assessment involves understanding her support system and whether the bond dynamic is healthy or codependent."

"The bond is healthy." The words came out hard and certain. "And what happens between us isn't going to change depending on your opinion of it."

"I'm not asking for your opinion to change the bond," she said. "I'm asking because Ms. Rowe's testimony about your relationship was notably sparse. She was very clear about what you were to her in practical terms. She was less clear about what you are to her emotionally. That gap suggested either reticence or an unstable attachment she didn't want to acknowledge."

Gideon looked at me. I felt the message in that look: this was strategic, not personal, and the answer mattered.

I stood.

"Twenty minutes," I told Dr. Okafor. "That's what you get."

She led me into an office that was aggressively neutral—beige walls, clinical lighting, the kind of space designed not to trigger anyone's emotional response. Even the air smelled scrubbed, sterile, deliberately empty of anything a person could hold onto. She sat across from me and opened a file.

"You met Ms. Rowe five days ago," she said. "Is that correct?"

"Five days, yes."

"In that time, you've bonded with her, slept on the floor to protect her, held perimeter while she integrated her magical signature into the ward network, defended her against her father, and supported her through a Council evaluation." She looked up. "That's significant attachment for five days."

"It is."

"And you attribute that to the bond."

"I attribute it to her," I said. "The bond just confirms what my wolf already decided."