Page 27 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Eat," he said simply to the room at large, meeting no one's eyes.

Roan sat and accepted a plate with the same compliance as everyone else, which told me something meaningful about the hierarchy operating in this farmhouse.

Later—after Roan had taken a call in the front room, after Gideon had retreated behind his laptop with the focus of someone building something intricate from very fine thread—I found Jace at the kitchen window.

He was watching the eastern tree line with the attention he gave the property's weakest angle.

I came to stand beside him, not quite touching, and looked at the same stretch of shadow and pine.

"The farmhouse knows me now," I said.

"Tara told me." He didn't look away from the tree line. "She said your integration was cleaner than expected."

"She said my instincts were more developed than my training."

"She's right."

A pause.

His shoulders shifted—not tense, just settling into a different readiness.

"Your father suppressed what he couldn't control. He didn't understand that suppression and weakness aren't the same thing."

I looked at his profile—the hard jaw, the dark eyes tracking movement in the trees with the automatic vigilance of a predator that never fully stood down.

"You said you'd tell me about the bond today."

His jaw shifted.

I felt the weight of what it cost him—not reluctance, but the effort of a man who had spent years not attaching to anything and was now being asked to put language to the most significant attachment of his life.

Through the bond, I felt the wolf press closer, testing the distance between us, measuring it in increments of heat.

"Yes," he said. "I did."

He turned from the window, and for the first time since the parking lot he looked at me without the flat control fully in place.

Without the managed surface.

Just—present.

The wolf and the man both, looking at me with the unhidden weight of something that had made a decision and was done pretending it hadn't.

"Tonight," he said. "After the perimeter check. When the house is quiet."

The gold rose at my fingertips.

I let it.

"Tonight," I agreed.

Outside, the eastern tree line held its shadows.

The farmhouse wards hummed around both of us, recognizing my frequency now alongside his, the magical architecture of this defended place holding us both inside its knowing.

I was beginning to understand what it meant to be somewhere that knew you.

I was beginning to understand I'd never had that before.