Page 71 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Good," I said. "He shouldn't."

It was strange, that phrase. Deciding without permission. I'd been asking for permission my whole life. Permission to exist the way I was. Permission to use my power. Permission to want things that weren't on Gabriel's approved list. Now I was in a room where the permission had been formally rescinded. Officially voided. And I was supposed to just choose things.

The first thing I chose was to call my father.

I took the call on the porch. Jace stayed inside where he could feel me through the bond but give me the distance I needed for a conversation that was mine to have without an audience.

I'd rehearsed this call a hundred times in my head over the years, in a hundred different versions—some angry, some pleading, some so carefully neutral they barely sounded like me at all. None of those rehearsals had prepared me for how it would actually feel: not like confrontation, but like closing a door I'd spent nine years standing in the frame of, afraid to let it shut.

Through the open door I could hear him pacing. Hear the restless energy of a wolf who wanted to be present but understood that this was not his moment.

"The ruling is complete," I said when Gabriel answered. "Both rulings. Delaney is as autonomous as I am now. Whatever authority you think you still have is procedurally void. The Council has set precedent. Any further attempt to activate either contract will be treated as violation of charter law."

I heard him speak. His voice thin through the phone line. Still carrying that old righteousness. Still treating this like a negotiation instead of a conclusion.

"I did everything to protect you," he was saying.

"You did everything to control me," I said. My voice was steady. Carried the weight of nine years finally finding language. "You called it protection. You called it love. But it was control. It was documentation. It was the careful design of a man who decided my worth before I had a voice in the matter. I'm choosing to believe you thought you were protecting me. But I'm not going to let you keep using that belief as justification for managing my life."

A pause. I could imagine him on the other end. Processing. Recalculating. Trying to find the angle he'd missed.

"That said," I continued, "I don't hate you. I don't think you're entirely wrong about why you did it. But I'm done being the person you get to keep managing. And you're going to have to learn to live with that."

Another pause.

"If you want to have a relationship with me going forward," I said, "it's going to be one where I get to say no. Where I get to make decisions you disagree with. Where my autonomy isn't negotiable. Those are the terms. You can accept them or you can walk away. But I'm not going back to the way it was."

I ended the call before he could respond.

I stood on the porch for a moment in the Tennessee evening. Felt the weight of it settle into something I could carry instead of something that carried me.

There was no triumph in it, exactly. I'd expected triumph, in all those hundred rehearsed versions—some bright, sharp satisfaction at finally saying the thing out loud. What I felt instead was quieter than that. Steadier. Less like winning a fight and more like setting down something I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten it had a weight at all.

Jace came out to the porch.

He didn't speak. He just came to stand beside me and looked at the same Tennessee woods I'd been looking at. I caught his scent on the evening air before I felt the bond confirm it—cedar, close, unhurried. Through the bond I felt his steadiness. His presence. The quiet way he existed in proximity without needing to fill the space with words.

"I'm not angry anymore," I said finally. "Not at him. Not at what he did or how he did it."

"I know."

"But I need to tell you something about what comes next."

"All right."

"The bond was my first choice," I said. "The first thing I chose that was entirely mine. With nobody else deciding what it meant or how it should work." I turned to look at him. At the dark eyes. The controlled focus. The wolf present and patient at the edges. At the fresh mark on his throat, mirroring the one on my shoulder. "I need what comes after the bond to be mine too."

"What does that look like?"

"It looks like you trusting me to decide when. For everything. The formal bonding ceremony, the claiming, the whole shape of it." I held his gaze. "Because control and trust aren't the same thing. I need to know that what happens between us is something I chose, fully and completely, without anyone else's authority involved."

Something shifted in his expression. Recognition. Acceptance.

"I can do that," he said.

"I know."

I reached over and took his hand, and for once there was nothing to prove in it—just his hand, just mine, just the simple fact of reaching. His fingers closed around mine. Warm and steady and entirely under my control to hold or release. Through the bond I felt him wait. His wolf at full attention but entirely patient. A predator who'd decided that this woman was worth every ounce of restraint he had.