Page 46 of Claimed By The Tracker

"We're not running," Jace said. His voice was level, controlled, but the wolf was present in every syllable, a low vibration underneath the words that raised the fine hairs on my arms from across the room.

He was holding himself back from moving toward me, from taking the decision out of my hands by making it about protection instead of strategy—and the effort of that restraint showed in the tendons of his forearms. "Every safehouse we relocate to is ground we don't know. This is ground we do. We're holding."

He looked at me when he said it. Not asking permission. Asking agreement, which was different, and better.

"We're holding," I said.

Roan nodded once, and the farmhouse shifted into the stance of people who'd stopped dancing around the threat and started bracing for impact.

Maddox went out to walk the perimeter, and I watched him through the window pause at the eastern fence line—the bad sight lines Jace had named—and stand there a long moment with his head tilted, scenting the wind off the tree line before he moved on. Nothing yet. But he marked the corner post on his way past, palm dragged deliberately along the wood, a wolf's promissory note: this is claimed, and defended.

Gideon isolated our communications onto channels Voss's Council contact couldn't monitor, muttering to himself in the language of a man rebuilding a fortress out of encryption keys.

Tara ran the anchor points twice, then took my hands and checked my signature for degradation, thumbs pressed to the pulse points at my wrists. "Steady," she said, sounding almost surprised. "Steadier than last week."

"I've stopped being afraid of the wrong things," I told her. "It frees up a lot of room."

The house emptied by degrees as everyone found their task, and then it was just Jace and me and the county road beyond the glass, empty and pale in the morning light.

He came up behind me without a sound—he never made sound when it mattered—and I felt him before I felt him, the bond humming to life between us like a struck string. His hands settled at my hips, and the heat of him soaked through my shirt, and when he lowered his head to the curve of my neck he didn't kiss me. He breathed me in, slow and deep, chest expanding against my back, and the sound he made low in his throat wasn't quite human and wasn't trying to be.

"You're supposed to be reinforcing something," I said, not moving away. Not moving away at all.

"I am." His mouth grazed the spot where my shoulder met my throat, the spot that made my knees reconsider their job description, and my breath went ragged before I could stop it. "This is the thing I'm reinforcing."

"The others —"

"Are outside. Working. Like professionals." His teeth pressed, gently, a promise rather than a bite, and want rolled through me and down, pooling low, and through the bond I felt his answer to it—want banked hard under discipline, a fire he was keeping deliberately small because tonight might ask everything of both of us and he refused to spend himself now.

I turned in the circle of his arms so I was facing him, and the movement brought us chest to chest, close enough that I felt the graveled catch in his breathing before I heard it. Up close his eyes weren't just gold at the edges anymore—the color had spread, banked fire pushing out the hazel, and I understood with a small, fierce thrill that some part of him had already stopped deciding whether to want me and started simply failing to stop.

"You're losing," I said softly, and touched two fingers to the corner of his jaw where the muscle stood out hard as rope.

"Losing what?"

"The argument you're having with yourself. About being a professional."

"I never claimed to be winning it." His hand came up to cover mine, pressed my palm flat against his jaw, and held it there like he needed the anchor of it. "I claimed I was trying. There's a difference."

"How's trying working out?"

"Badly." The word came out low, half a laugh, half something rawer. He turned his head enough to drag his mouth along my palm, and the graze of teeth against the pad of my thumb sent a current straight down my spine that had nothing professional about it at all. "You want to know what I keep thinking about, standing here pretending to guard a window?"

"Tell me."

"That if Voss's people come tonight, there's a version of this where I don't get to." His voice dropped further, rough at the edges, and the arm around my waist tightened, not painfully—carefully, like he was measuring exactly how much of his strength he trusted himself with. "So I'm not spending it in pieces. I'm not giving you a stolen five minutes in a kitchen and calling it enough. When I have you, Lena, I'm going to have all of you, and it's going to take longer than either of us has patience for right now."

Heat climbed up my throat, and lower, an answering ache settled in that had no interest in strategy meetings or ward maintenance or anything that wasn't the weight of his hand sliding to the small of my back. "That's a lot of confidence for a man who hasn't asked yet."

"I'm not asking." He bent his head until his mouth hovered a breath from mine, close enough that I could feel the words more than hear them. "I'm promising. Ask me again after."

I closed the last of the distance myself—because waiting had never once in my life gotten me anything I wanted faster—and the kiss he gave me back was slow and deliberate and utterly at odds with the urgency running underneath it, a banked-fire kind of restraint that told me more about how badly he wanted this than losing control ever could have.

When we broke apart we were both breathing like we'd run somewhere, and his forehead came down to rest against mine, gold eyes steady on my face.

"When this is over," he said again, quieter now, "I'm taking you somewhere with a door that locks, and we're not coming out until you've forgotten Voss's name."

"I've already forgotten it," I managed. "Who are we bracing for again?"