Page 50 of Claimed By The Tracker

The SUVs came up the property line in formation.

Not an extraction team—Voss was done with patience. This was the enforcement network in full coordination, and they were coming through the wards with the systematic competence of people who'd been prepared for the resistance.

Four vehicles, engines still running hot enough that I caught the diesel and brake-dust smell of them from two hundred yards out, underneath it the sharp bite of gun oil that told me exactly how prepared they were.

I felt the first breach through my feet—a sharp disruption in the ward frequency, the sound of something old being pressed against by something new. Lena's hand went rigid in mine. Through the bond I felt her magic flare, instinctive, protective, a response that came from the animal part of her magic before her strategic mind could engage.

"Inside," I said. Not a request.

"Jace—"

"Now."

We were moving before the second SUV breached the wards. I pulled her back toward the tree line, toward the perimeter Maddox had positioned with extraction protocols already running. The woods were familiar to me in a way they'd never be familiar to Voss's people. Every root, every angle, the way the terrain dropped and rose again in patterns that favored someone who'd run perimeters for five years in worse conditions than this.

My wolf was up, fully present, my vision bleeding gold at the edges. The restraint I'd been holding since the morning dissolved—not because I was losing control, but because control and readiness weren't the same thing, and right now I needed to be ready in ways that took the animal presence fully forward.

"I can hold the wards," she said, her magic rising to meet the pressure at the property line. Gold bright and precise and entirely under her control now.

"You can do better." I got her to the tree line and stopped. "Tara's going to walk you through the defense from the kitchen. I've got the two on foot coming around the south side."

"You're not coming with me?"

"Not yet." I could smell them now—three men, maybe four, moving through the brush a hundred yards south, sweat and adrenaline under the gun oil. "Get inside. I'll be right behind you."

She hesitated one second, then nodded and ran for the house, and I turned south into the trees.

The first one never saw me coming. I heard his heartbeat before I saw him—too fast, too loud, an amateur's rhythm—and I closed the distance low and fast, claws breaking just past the nail bed enough to close a hand over his rifle and rip it wide before he could bring it up. He went down hard, disarmed and gasping, and I was already moving before he hit the ground.

The second one heard the first one fall and turned too late. I hit him shoulder-first, took him off his feet, and had his wrists pinned before he'd even finished understanding what hit him. "Stay down," I said, and something in my voice—not quite human anymore—convinced him better than the words did.

A third man broke off toward the house, and I ran him down through underbrush that would've slowed anyone without a wolf's sense of where the ground actually was. I caught him twenty yards short of the porch, spun him into a tree hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and left him folded over his own knees in the frost.

Three down, no one bleeding worse than a split lip, nothing that wouldn't heal. That was the line I'd drawn for myself walking into these woods—stop them, don't become the thing Voss wanted a hearing about.

I ran back for the house with my pulse still hammering, my shirt torn at the shoulder, and the smell of the fight clinging to me under the frost and pine.

Maddox was already moving when I hit the east door. Roan was on his phone, coordinates flowing, secondary extraction vectors alive. Gideon's laptop was throwing pale light across his face, and Tara was at the kitchen table with Lena's ward documentation spread before her like a tactical map.

"Status," Roan said, not bothering with preamble.

"Three on foot, south side, neutralized. Four vehicles still at the perimeter." I dropped into the doorway, breathing hard. "Voss's enforcement network, not Council standard. They're coming through the wards like they've got some kind of signature key."

"Any of them see your face?" Roan asked.

"No. And nobody's dead. Two rifles down, one man who'll be explaining a tree to his supervisor." I caught my breath. "That's the good version of what could've happened out there."

"Noted." Roan didn't waste time being impressed. "Gideon—who's running this?"

"Delaney." Gideon said it the way someone says a fact he's already processed and is no longer surprised by. "Her statement used Voss's authentication protocols as evidence against him—so he counter-filed, claimed she was contaminated testimony given under duress, and used that to get a secondary hearing that requires Council presence." Gideon didn't look up from the screen. "That hearing put his people inside the warrant parameters. Legally, at least."

Tara looked up. Her dark eyes found mine, then Lena. "Your signature holds them at the perimeter. It won't hold if they breach the base anchor. Once they're inside, it's hand-to-hand."

"Already handled three of those hands," I said.

"There are more coming than three," Roan said. "How long can you hold?" That last one was aimed at Lena.

"Depends on their capacity. If it's just kinetic pressure, indefinitely." Lena's magic was already rising, and I felt it through the bond—not panic, not the wild discharge that'd thrown me against a car door in a diner parking lot. Strategic. Directed. "If they've got a practitioner⁠⁠—"