Page 57 of Claimed By The Tracker

"That's extremely technical."

"Yes."

The bond hummed between us, not loud, not demanding. The porch was already settled—we'd said what needed saying through a phone call days ago, and I'd felt the weight of the porch rearrange something I was still carrying. I didn't need to reopen it here in the pre-dawn.

That ground was firm now. What wasn't settled was the next thing, the thing that had kept me awake: whether I wanted him at my back when I walked through the doors of the Council chamber.

"I have to go give testimony," I said. "When I come out, I want to talk. Not the careful, managed version."

"I'll be here."

"I know you will." And then, because it was true and he'd earned the truth: "That's not nothing. You showing up without being asked—that's not nothing."

Something moved behind the careful stillness of his face. He didn't reach for me. He just held my eyes a moment, and let me see that he'd heard exactly what I'd said and exactly what I hadn't.

I went inside.

The inquiry took two hours and forty minutes.

I sat in a room with wood paneling and neutral lighting and three members of the charter violation review subgroup, and I told them everything. The documentation I'd found at nineteen. The nine years of carrying it alone. The wedding morning, the diner, the parking lot where my magic threw a wolf shifter two feet against a borrowed car.

"My father signed a contract granting claim over my power when I was nineteen," I told the subgroup chair. "I found out the day I turned nineteen and never told anyone. I have spent every year since deciding how much of my life I was willing to spend afraid of a piece of paper I never agreed to."

"And the activation clause Mr. Voss is attempting to invoke," the chair said. "You understand its terms?"

"Better than he does," I said. "I've had nine years to read it."

I told them about my father's Council contacts and Voss's enforcement network and the deliberate machinery of a system that had been treating me as a bloodline asset since I was eleven years old.

I told them in the formal language Tara had drilled into me, my gold rising at the edges of the words like punctuation. When I finished, the subgroup chair set down her pen.

"The preliminary finding is procedurally complete," she said. "The formal ruling will follow within forty-eight hours."

"And the activation clause?" I asked. "If Voss tries to execute before your ruling?"

"Then he executes against a subject whose autonomy this subgroup is actively affirming," she said, with the neutral efficiency of someone who'd watched the process work before and expected it to work again. "That would not go well for him."

Delaney was there, in the back, with careful hair and shaking hands. When they asked her to confirm her statement, her voice wavered only once.

"I didn't know what the contract meant," she told them. "I thought I was protecting her. I was wrong about what protection looked like."

She said it looking at me, not at the subgroup, and something passed between us that was older than the inquiry and would outlast it.

When it was over, I walked out with Tara at my shoulder and Delaney a step behind, the afternoon light doing ordinary things to the Asheville streets, and Jace exactly where I'd left him.

"How bad?" he asked, reading my face before I'd said a word.

"Not bad. Forty-eight hours to a ruling, and the chair as good as told Voss not to bother trying anything before then."

"That's not nothing," he said, echoing my own words back at me, and something in the bond eased at the small mirror of it.

I started toward him.

Gabriel Rowe was standing at the bottom of the steps.

I stopped.

He looked the way he always looked—composed, silver at the temples, impeccably dressed in the kind of suit that cost more than my first three months of rent after I left. His expression was patient and righteous and concerned, the face of a father who loved his daughter and was trying to help her understand a difficult situation.