Page 76 of Claimed By The Tracker

I stood near the elevators with lukewarm coffee in one hand and my briefing notes in the other.

Composure came easy.

I'd been performing it since I was a child.

Six days.

Six days since three death threats landed in my secured diplomatic inbox.

Written in Northern Conclave cipher.

Internal formatting. Not something an outsider could fake.

Someone close.

Someone trusted.

I'd reported them the right way. Clean paper trail. Accepted the Pack Guard Agency referral without argument because my logic had always been steadier than my feelings, and the logic said: get professionals.

Six days of logistics. Briefing packets. Telling myself I could steer whoever walked through that door the way I'd steered every room I'd ever stood in.

My wolf had stayed quiet through all of it.

Quiet the way I'd kept her for eight years.

Not asleep.

Never asleep.

Just pressed down beneath something that started as discipline and hardened into skin.

An Arden female who showed dominant wolf instincts became a target for arranged claiming under old Conclave law. I'd watched my father use that law on two of my cousins before I turned twenty-two.

So I learned.

Suppress.

Control.

Look manageable.

The lobby door opened.

The air changed before I understood why.

My wolf felt it a full second ahead of me—some old territorial thing lifting its head toward the door.

Not frantic.

Not clawing.

Just suddenly, completely awake.

I turned.

One man.

Tall. Lean. Charcoal suit, not a wrinkle in it anywhere. Ash-blond hair. No sign the city outside had touched him at all—which meant he'd driven, or he was the kind of man who moved through crowds without letting them touch him either.