Page 45 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Status on the filing," Gideon said. No wasted words tonight. "Still frozen. Voss's challenge holds until the primary tier rules on whether the charter board even has authority to hear it. Could be days. Could be longer if his Council contact has any say in how slowly that ruling moves."

"So we're back to waiting," Roan said. It wasn't a complaint. It was an inventory.

"We're back to waiting on the paperwork," Gideon corrected. "We're not waiting on anything else. Voss knows we filed. He knows Delaney's out of his reach now. That combination doesn't sit well with a man who prefers to be the one deciding what happens next."

"Meaning he moves anyway," Jace said. Flat. Certain.

"Meaning I'd plan for it," Gideon said, "rather than hope for the ruling to save us first."

Nobody argued. The room had the particular stillness of people recalculating the same threat from a new angle, and I felt it land in my own chest the same way—the filing hadn't ended anything. It had only told Voss exactly how far we were willing to go, and given him time to decide what that was worth answering.

Roan sent everyone to whatever rest they could get, and the house settled into its watch rotation around us. I lay awake longer than I wanted to, Jace's steady presence at the edge of the bond like a hand at my back even from another room, turning Gideon's words over until they'd worn smooth: he knows we filed.

Whatever came next, we'd stopped being the only ones who understood the stakes.

Chapter 14

Voss's Challenge

LENA

Something had shifted overnight, and I felt it before I understood it: the filing wasn't progress. It was a trap.

We'd walked straight into it.

Roan moved through the farmhouse with the grim efficiency of a man recalculating every assumption he'd made in the last week. "Forty-eight hours is optimistic if Voss moves during the legal stall. Pessimistic is he's already started positioning for a breach."

"How pessimistic are we being this morning?" I asked.

"I stopped being optimistic around dawn."

Gideon stayed at his laptop, fingers moving through layers of registry access he no longer officially had. "The challenge filing can drag for weeks. By the time the primary tier rules on the charter board's authority, Voss has had all the time he needs to execute. That's the elegance of it. He doesn't have to win the challenge. He just has to keep us standing still while it's pending."

"So the paperwork was never the play," I said. "The paperwork was the cage."

"The paperwork was the cage," Gideon agreed, and didn't look up.

Jace was already at the kitchen table, jaw tight, both hands flattened against the table like he didn't trust what they'd do if he let them loose.

His wolf was riding high behind his eyes, gold bleeding through the hazel, and even seated he carried the coiled stillness of a predator that had caught a scent it didn't like. When Roan crossed behind his chair, Jace's head turned a fraction to track him—instinct logging every moving body in the room, even pack. Especially now.

The logic was airtight and terrible.

I stood at the kitchen window and watched the farmhouse wake up to the reality we'd been avoiding. The legal strategy had holes. Delaney's corroborating testimony wouldn't matter if Voss moved before the review was properly underway. The filing was just paper. Voss had people, resources, and a Council contact willing to slow-walk the proceedings until paper was all we had left.

"Walk me through what a breach looks like," I said. "If he comes. What does that actually mean?"

Roan glanced at Jace first—a silent question, does she want the real answer—and Jace didn't soften it for me, which was its own kind of respect. "It means a retrieval team," Jace said. "Probably six to eight. They'll test the wards at the property line first, likely at night, likely from the tree line on the east side where the sight lines are worst. If the wards hold, they fall back and try to draw us out. If the wards don't hold —"

"They won't get the chance to find out," Tara cut in, and I could hear it in her voice—the moment a person stops planning and starts preparing for actual violence. "The layered wardwork on this property has been rebuilt twice since we got here. If they move on this location, they're coming against a practiced team and a warded ground that knows every one of our signatures and none of theirs."

"And if they bring a witch of their own?"

"Then she'd better be very good," Tara said, "because I'm very angry."

A short, hard laugh went around the table—the kind that isn't really humor, just pressure escaping. Jace didn't laugh. His nostrils flared, once, and I watched him catch my scent across the kitchen and hold it the way another man might hold a hand. The gold in his eyes steadied. Whatever his wolf was preparing for, I was the fixed point it was preparing around.

"We could run," Maddox said, because somebody had to say it out loud so we could kill it properly. "Relocate before the window closes. Make him chase."