Page 74 of Claimed By The Tracker

"We'll get there," I said. And meant it the way I meant most things now—plainly, without performance, because performance had never once kept me safe and the truth, lately, had kept me safer than anything else I'd tried.

Jace's hand found mine under the table. I turned it over and held on. The same gesture from the eastern property line. From a year of mornings just like this one.

Later, after the kitchen had emptied and the wards had settled into their nighttime hum, I stood on the porch where Jace had first told me what the bond actually was. Not the careful version. The true one.

I felt the cold the same way I had that night. Bracing. Honest. Under it, Jace's scent wrapped around me, solid despite the cold, cedar and certainty the way it always was now.

"You're thinking about the fifth case," Jace said. He didn't ask. He'd stopped needing to.

"I'm thinking about all of it." I leaned into the solid warmth of him. His arm coming around my shoulders. His palm settling over the mark on my shoulder while my own hand found the one I'd left at his throat—both of them warm under my fingers, both of them ours. "The Council. My father. The woman who recused herself and left us a door to walk through. The Conclave behind her. Bigger than any of it. It's not finished."

"No."

"Does that scare you?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not performing the answer. Just finding it. "No," he said finally. "I spent five years building a life around not attaching to anything because attachment meant something to lose. Then I met a woman who threw me against a car and decided I was worth the risk anyway." His thumb traced the same slow circle against my wrist that it had a year ago. In a kitchen. In the dark. Before either of us had said anything true out loud. "I'm not scared of what's unfinished. I'm just glad I get to be here when it isn't anymore."

I looked up at him. This man who had been sent to bring me back and had become instead the first thing I'd ever chosen entirely for myself.

"Good," I said. "Because I'm not done yet."

"I know."

"You're not going to try to talk me into taking it slower? Being more careful?"

"I stopped trying to talk you into careful the day you threw a plate at a wall," he said. "I learned. Slowly. But I learned."

"Good wolf."

"Don't push it."

I laughed, and felt the sound of it settle into the bond the way everything did now—shared, doubled, no longer just mine to carry alone.

The bond settled warm between us. Steady as it had ever been. And somewhere beyond the tree line the wards held their quiet watch over a farmhouse that had become, against every odd I'd been handed at birth, exactly mine.

There would be more to fight. I had stopped pretending otherwise. And stopped being afraid of what that meant.

But tonight, there was only this: his arm around me. The cold clean air. And the hard-won quiet of a woman who had finally stopped hiding and found, on the other side of it, somewhere worth staying.

Thank you for reading Claimed By The Tracker.

Lena Rowe never wanted a Pack Guard wolf shadowing her every move. Jace Mercer never wanted to feel his wolf recognize a witch as his. Some claims aren't chosen—they're discovered. If their story stayed with you, the world of the Veil Council is only beginning to open.

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The Pack Guard Agency series continues.