Page 25 of Claimed By The Tracker

Something shifted in his expression.

"She's integrating well," Tara said, without looking at him.

"I can see that."

His voice was even, but the wolf was present behind his eyes, and what I read there wasn't surprise.

It was more complicated than that—the look of a man watching something he'd suspected become real, and feeling the full weight of what that meant.

He crossed to the coffeepot.

His hand passed close to my shoulder as he reached past me for a mug—not touching, but close enough that I felt the heat of him against my skin, close enough that I caught the scent of pine and leather underneath.

My magic flickered gold at my wrists for one involuntary second before I pulled it back.

He didn't comment.

But his breath changed, and the growl that rumbled low in his chest wasn't quite audible.

Almost.

I felt it through the bond more than heard it.

The morning organized itself around the work.

Tara drilled me through the remaining anchor points with the brisk, unsentimental instruction of someone who valued competence over comfort and assumed I did too.

By the time we reached the sixth point, the ward structure felt different against my senses—not foreign anymore, not the background hum of someone else's defensive system.

It had taken in my signature.

It knew my frequency the way it knew Maddox's and Jace's and Tara's.

The farmhouse had learned me.

I sat back on my heels after the final anchor and felt the wards settle around my presence like a second skin, and the sensation of it—being recognized by something that hadn't known me a day ago—did something to my chest I hadn't anticipated.

This was what it felt like to exist without hiding.

Not safety exactly.

The threat was still real, Voss's contractor still in Knoxville, the counter-filing still racing a closing window.

But something structural had changed.

I was woven into this place's defenses now, and this place was woven into mine, and that was a kind of belonging I hadn't known to want until I felt it.

"The eastern anchor is the weakest point," Tara said, studying her notes. "The original contractor rushed it—pressure of timeline, visible in the work. If your signature is added specifically to that point, the weakness becomes less critical."

"Show me."

Tara looked up.

Something passed between us in the look—not warmth exactly, not yet.

But the beginning of mutual respect between two women who had both decided that competence was a more honest currency than charm.

She showed me.