Page 72 of Claimed By The Tracker

For the first time in my life, being wanted by someone felt like safety instead of threat.

We stood there a while longer, not talking, the Tennessee evening settling gold and quiet around the farmhouse. I could hear the others inside—Gideon's keyboard, Tara's low voice, Delaney laughing at something Roan said, real laughter, the first I'd heard from her since the plaza.

"You did that," Jace said, following my attention through the bond. "Gave her a place where she could laugh again."

"We did that," I corrected. "You, and Roan, and Gideon, and Tara, and Maddox. I just showed up angry enough to make it necessary."

"Being angry enough to show up is most of the work." He turned to face me fully, the last of the daylight catching gold in his eyes. "You know what I keep thinking about?"

"What?"

"The diner. Feels like a lifetime ago. You threw a plate at a wall because a man wouldn't take no for an answer, and I thought, there she is. That's the whole fight, right there, in one motion." He reached up and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, careful, deliberate. "You've been fighting that same fight ever since. Just louder. Just with better backup."

"I like the backup."

"The backup likes you too." His mouth curved, almost a smile. "Roan included, whether he says so directly or not."

"He wouldn't say so directly if his life depended on it."

"No," Jace agreed. "But you'll notice he rebuilt Delaney's entire security profile in an afternoon with one hand that doesn't fully work anymore. That's Roan for 'I care about what happens to you.'"

I thought about that. About all of them, this strange, chosen, ferociously loyal family I'd fallen into sideways, through a bond I hadn't asked for and wouldn't now trade for anything.

"I want to tell them," I said. "Properly. Not just let them smell the mark and draw their own conclusions."

"Tell them what, exactly?"

"That I chose this. All of it. The bond, the mark, the fight with my father, the family I'm building instead of the one I was born into. I want to say it out loud, where everyone can hear it."

"Then let's go say it."

He held out his hand. I took it, and we walked back inside together, into the noise and the light and the family that had built itself around us one impossible day at a time—Gideon's monitors humming, Tara's quiet competence, Maddox's watchful presence in every doorway, Roan's dry humor holding the whole strange household together with a hand that didn't work quite right anymore and a will that hadn't bent once.

Chapter 26

Still Getting Started

LENA—ONE YEAR LATER

The morning ritual had become habit now.

Cold coffee. Window. Eastern tree line. The same position I'd claimed the morning after the ruling, the same stillness I'd learned to build into my body as something other than bracing.

The mark on my shoulder was a year old now. Jace refreshed it every month, the same ritual—teeth and blood and the bond flaring gold between us—and every time it felt less like claiming and more like coming home.

I pressed my palm against the window and felt the wards hum in response. The farmhouse had changed in a year, though not in the ways I would have predicted when I first crossed its threshold with a duffel bag and twelve years of hidden magic crackling under my skin.

Maddox had built a second anchor ring around the north pasture because Delaney needed somewhere to practice that wasn't load-bearing. Tara had claimed the back room as a training space and filled it with diagrams I was finally fluent enough to read on sight. Gideon worked from the kitchen table most days now. Which meant the coffee was always on. The conversation was always half intelligence briefing, half something closer to family.

I'd stopped counting the days since the ruling.

I'd started counting something else instead. The mornings I woke up and didn't have to decide whether to be afraid.

Jace found me at the window the way he always did. I caught his scent before I heard him—cedar, and under it now, something settled and permanent that hadn't been there in the early days, the smell of a wolf who'd stopped bracing for loss. His hand settled at my waist before I'd finished hearing his footsteps. I'd stopped being surprised by that. The bond didn't startle me anymore. It just was. Steady. Low. A second pulse I would have missed if it ever stopped.

The mark I'd left on his throat showed at his collar when he leaned past me to look out the glass. I still felt the small proprietary warmth of seeing it there. The way I felt his on my shoulder—a matched pair of permanent facts. His and mine. Given and returned.

"Delaney wants to show you something," he said. "She's been working on it for a week and wouldn't let me see it first."