Page 63 of Claimed By The Tracker

"Gideon," I said, dropping into the chair beside him. "What have you got?"

"Not enough yet." He didn't look up from the screen, but his voice carried none of the coldness the words might have suggested—just focus, absolute and familiar. "I've confirmed a filing exists. Two years old. I don't have the content yet. Whoever archived it buried it deeper than yours was."

"Buried how?"

"Sealed under a different department code. Employment records instead of magical asset registry. That's either sloppy filing or deliberate misdirection, and knowing your father, I'm betting on the second one."

Tara looked up from her own screen. "If it's under employment records, the acquisition clause language will be different. Softer. Less obviously predatory on its face. Which means proving coercion is going to be harder, not easier."

"Wonderful," Delaney said, from the doorway, her voice thin.

"He's not smarter than us," I said. "He's just had longer to practice."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't supposed to be. It was supposed to be true." I caught Jace's eye across the kitchen and saw him almost smile at hearing his own line come back out of my mouth.

"Difficult isn't impossible," Roan said, pulling out the chair beside her. "We've broken harder locks than this."

Something in his voice was pulled a little tighter than usual, a little more careful, and I felt it land in my chest the same way it always did when one of them was working harder than they let on. He caught me noticing and gave the smallest shake of his head. Not now. Later. I let it go, the way I was learning to let people carry what they weren't ready to set down yet.

"Two hours," Gideon said, already back at his keyboard. "I'll have the full filing by then. Everyone eat something in the meantime. This is going to be a long night."

Nobody moved to argue with him.

I found Jace by the window a few minutes later, watching the tree line the way he always did when the wolf wanted a perimeter check his human half knew wasn't strictly necessary yet. I came to stand beside him, close enough to catch his scent under the kitchen's coffee and old paper smell—cedar, steady, mine.

"You're doing the thing," I said.

"What thing."

"The thing where you catalog every exit before you let yourself sit down."

"Old habit." He didn't look away from the glass. "Hard one to break."

"You don't have to break it tonight." I leaned into his shoulder, just slightly. "Just don't let it be the only thing you're doing."

His hand found the small of my back, solid and grounding. "Copy that."

"Is that a promise or a deflection?"

"Both," he admitted. "Give me a minute to decide which one wins."

Behind us, the kitchen kept moving—Gideon's keys, Tara's low voice reading numbers into her phone, Maddox setting a plate in front of Delaney she hadn't asked for and wasn't going to refuse. Roan sat at the head of the table, steady as ever, the kitchen moving around him the way it always did—like a man who never had to raise his voice to be heard.

We had two hours. I intended to spend at least part of them believing, for just a little while, that this fight would be smaller than the last one.

I was wrong about that. But standing there in the kitchen with Jace's hand at my back and my family—all of it, the blood and the chosen kind both—working around me like a single animal with many hands, I let myself believe it anyway. Just for those two hours. I'd earned that much.

Outside, the last of the daylight went down behind the tree line, and the wards came up gold against the dark the way they did every evening now, warm and familiar, holding the shape of a home I hadn't known I was allowed to want.

Chapter 22

The Steps in Asheville

LENA

The formal ruling came forty-two hours later.