Page 62 of Claimed By The Tracker

I sat in the back seat beside her with my hand wrapped around hers. Watched the Tennessee highway blur past the window. Something cold and sharp worked its way through my chest. Not surprise. I was past surprise with Gabriel Rowe. But the reach of what he'd built was still revealing new rooms. New locked doors. New ways he'd found to turn family into leverage.

Jace sat in the row ahead of us, half turned back so he could watch both the road behind and Delaney's face. His profile sharp against the gray afternoon light. I could feel him through the bond—that second heartbeat I'd claimed on the eastern property line—and what I felt was the precise, controlled focus of a predator running threat assessments. His wolf was calculating. Gold at the edges of his vision.

"Tell me exactly what he said," I told Delaney. My voice was low and steady even though my magic was doing something restless under my skin. Gold flickered at my fingertips before I breathed it back down. "Word for word, if you can."

Delaney's hand tightened in mine. Her careful hair was coming undone at the temples. Her eyes had the exhaustion of someone who had just watched her understanding of family get dismantled in public.

"He called last night. After the inquiry notice arrived." She swallowed hard. "He said—very calmly, Uncle Gabriel calm—that I should understand my own contract status before I made the choice to testify against him."

"Did he specify what that meant?"

"No." Her voice cracked slightly. "He just let it sit there. Like he expected me to know what it meant. Or to be scared enough not to ask."

I looked at Jace. He held my eyes directly, no mirror between us. I read the same calculation I was running: Gabriel Rowe didn't make empty threats. If he'd mentioned Delaney's contract status, there was something there. Something documented. Something filed. Something he could activate.

My sister looked at me with the expression of a woman bracing for impact. "What does that mean, Lena? Contract status?"

"It means he filed something on you without your knowledge," I said quietly. "The same way he filed on me. The same way he's been building leverage into family members for probably longer than either of us realized." My magic flared gold at my wrists. Not because I was losing control but because I was angry—properly, viscerally angry—at a man who'd weaponized family into documentation and called it protection. "We need to know exactly what."

Jace pulled out his phone and made the call before we reached the highway junction. I listened to him deliver the summary in that quiet, efficient voice I was beginning to understand was his version of care.

"Delaney Rowe disclosed her father filed a contract status alert prior to her testimony," he said into the phone. His eyes found mine over the seat back. "No details on the contract itself. Just the existence of it. And the implication that testifying constituted breach. I need Gideon to pull everything on file. Any contract bearing her name. Any acquisition clauses. Any leverage Gabriel Rowe documented."

Gideon's voice came through thin and efficient. "On it. Give me two hours."

Jace ended the call. Up front, Maddox didn't change his pace or his grip on the wheel, but I caught the small shift in his shoulders that meant he was listening to every word. The rest of the drive passed in a silence that had different texture now. We were no longer traveling toward closure. We were traveling toward the discovery that closure was a wall with another room behind it.

Beside me, Delaney's breathing had gone shallow. I turned to look at her properly for the first time since the plaza—really look, the way I hadn't let myself while I was still parsing the shape of the threat instead of the person carrying it.

"Hey," I said. "Look at me."

She did.

"Whatever he filed, it doesn't hold. You understand that? Whatever leverage he thinks he has—it's paper. Paper burns."

"You didn't feel that certain about yours," Delaney said quietly. "Not at first."

She wasn't wrong. "No. But I have Gideon and Tara and a wolf who'd burn the whole Council down before he let it touch either of us. You have the same thing now. That's not nothing."

Something in her face loosened, fractionally. Not relief yet. But the beginning of it.

We pulled into the farmhouse drive as the light went long and gold across the tree line. I caught the scent of the wards before I saw them—that low hum of ozone and old magic that meant home now, in a way I was still getting used to trusting. Roan met us at the porch steps, already scanning the vehicle before it had fully stopped, reading all of us in one pass the way he always did.

"Gideon's already pulling records," Roan said, falling into step beside us like he'd been waiting at that exact spot for exactly this arrival. "He wants everyone in the kitchen in ten minutes."

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"Don't know yet." Roan's eyes moved over Delaney with a field medic's quick, assessing calm. "But if Gabriel filed something on her the same way he filed on you, we've got a template for breaking it. We've done this once already."

"Once was hard enough," Delaney said.

"Once was also a woman who didn't know she had people yet," Roan said. "You do now."

Delaney looked at him for a long moment, then at me, then at Jace, and something in her spine straightened that hadn't been straight since the plaza.

"Okay," she said. "Ten minutes."

Inside, the kitchen had already taken on the charged energy I was learning meant the household was mobilizing—Tara's laptop open on the counter, Gideon's second monitor propped against the fruit bowl, Maddox pulling extra chairs from the dining room without being asked. I caught Jace's eyes across the room and felt, under the tension, the steady thread of the bond holding.