Chapter 13
TRISTAN
The sandbag swung back on its chains, the leather groaning. I drove my knee into the center with enough force to crack the inner foam core.
The snap echoed across the empty combat arena. It didn't do a single thing to settle the charge crackling under my skin.
I was furious. A dark, territorial fury I'd spent three days suppressing behind a carefully constructed frat-boy smile and empty academic jokes.
Trent Hawthorne.
Just the thought of him touching Wren's jaw in the courtyard made the beast in my chest roar for blood.
He'd looked at her like a toy he'd dropped in the dirt and was only now returning to claim.
He hadn't seen the terror in her eyes. Hadn't seen the way her body flinched at his proximity — the psychological damage running far deeper than the physical scar he'd carved into her neck.
I hit the bag again. Left, right, an uppercut that tore the leather seam near the top.
Sand spilled onto the mat.
"You're going to have to pay the bursar to replace that," Hayes observed from the sidelines.
He was sitting on a metal bench, a towel around his neck, looking as wound-up as I felt. His pine scent was sharp today — masking an underlying anxiety that only Chris and I could read. A general trying to secure a compromised border.
"Bill it to my family's account," I growled, pulling off my hand wraps. "I'll tell my father it's a training expense to prepare for the inevitable territorial bloodbath when Trent tries to file a custody claim."
"Trent won't file a public claim in the registry," Chris said, walking into the arena with a tablet instead of his usual stack of ancient texts.
His amber eyes were sharp. The hyper-focused look of a strategist dismantling an explosive. "I've been reviewing the archaic bylaws governing severed tethers all afternoon."
"And?" Hayes demanded.
"A severed tether legally reverts the omega to an unbonded, neutral status — emancipating them from the original dynasty's control," Chris explained, swiping across the tablet.
"However, Trent's father included a 'retroactive asset recovery' clause buried in the original dowry paperwork Wren's family signed. "
"Define 'asset recovery,'" I said.
Chris looked up, expression grim. "If the omega is proven to possess a latent magical abnormality that alters their political or monetary value post-severance, the original contract can be retroactively enforced through a private council tribunal.
They claim they were defrauded by the initial concealment of the asset. "
"What counts as a latent magical abnormality under the clause?" I said.
Chris set the tablet down. "In modern pack law, there's only one biological anomaly significant enough to retroactively rewrite a contract: a verified Pack-Heart.
An omega whose magical core can simultaneously anchor and amplify the power of multiple alphas.
Historically, the dynasties that controlled a Pack-Heart controlled the outcome of territorial wars.
The modern council treats one as a continental stabilizing asset — something to be owned and strategically deployed, not protected. "
I threw the wraps onto the bench. "He's treating her like stolen commercial real estate."
"He's treating her like an active Pack-Heart," Hayes corrected, rubbing his jaw. "He smelled the triangulated load on her skin. If Trent takes that clause to a council tribunal, they won't care about ethics. They'll see a stabilizing asset and lock her back in a cage with him before sunset."
"He can't prove she's a Pack-Heart," I said. "He smelled the stabilization, but the silver tether is hidden under her clothes. He doesn't have the evidence to trigger a hearing."
"He doesn't need evidence. He needs a council mandate authorizing a magical audit," Chris countered.
"If they force her into a diagnostic circle, the silver lines will flare under magical scrutiny.
The second the council sees a verified Pack-Heart mark, Wren stops being a student.
She becomes a continental asset. They'll strip her autonomy and auction her stability to the highest bidder. "
The thought ran cold in my veins.
She had barely survived a brutal public rejection only to land in the center of the most explosive political crossfire in the modern shifter world. The terror in her eyes when Trent touched her. The panic when she'd begged us to let her burn her own core out rather than face his cruelty again.
I wouldn't let them take her back. I'd level the entire Northern Dynasty before I let Trent Hawthorne leash her to him again.
But brute force wouldn't solve a closed-door legal tribunal.
"We need leverage," I said, pushing off the chain-link wall. "We need to know what Trent is planning before he files. If we know his angle, we can block it before it gains traction."
"He's an envoy. His comms are encrypted by Northern pack magic," Hayes said. "I can't authorize surveillance against another envoy without my father finding out. And the last thing we want is the Aldridge Alpha sniffing around our perimeter."
"I don't need your family's surveillance," I said quietly.
Hayes and Chris both went still. Two different calculations locking onto me simultaneously.
They knew my frat-boy persona was a constructed mask.
They knew how my family operated. Not generational old money — violent new money.
An empire built on underground gambling dens, illegal combat rings, and a network of information brokers that operated outside council law.
I'd spent my adolescence in the ruthless underbelly of the city long before my father bought our way into legacy status at Aldridge.
"Tristan," Hayes said — the command weight of an Heir demanding transparency from a packmate.
"I'm using my inheritance," I said, pulling a burner phone from the bottom of my gym bag.
"Trent thinks he's untouchable because he operates in daylight and high society. But wealthy envoys get bored in neutral territory. They make stupid mistakes. They hire private security, buy illicit information, indulge in vices the council wouldn't approve of."
I flipped the phone open and dialled a sequence I hadn't used since freshman year.
"I'm putting invisible eyes on him. Guys who don't exist on any government registry. If Trent contacts a council lawyer, I'll know before the ink dries on the retainer. We cut off his legal threat before it gained momentum."
Hayes studied me for a long, tense moment. His lifelong respect for pack law warring with the memory of Wren collapsing onto cold stone in a campus courtyard.
The memory won.
He gave a curt nod. "Do it. Don't leave a trail."
I walked into the dark concrete hallway near the back locker rooms. The encrypted line connected after three rings.
"Thought you went straight, pretty boy," a gravel voice answered.
"I need a ghost, Marcus," I said. "A target arriving from the Northern territories. Official envoy named Trent Hawthorne, operating out of the VIP legacy dorms on campus."
"The VIP dorms are tight," Marcus said. The click of a lighter. "Multi-layered wards. Trigger-happy security. That's expensive real estate to breach."
"Double your usual rate, paid in untraceable silver within the hour," I said. "Full twenty-four-hour shadow. Audio, visual, and a complete list of every local contact his comms access. I need his endgame before he makes his first move."
"You're tracking a seated high council envoy?" A beat of silence. "That's treason, Tristan. If they catch my guys—"
"Just get me the intelligence," I growled, power crackling visibly off my skin. "If his security spots your tail, you don't exist and we never spoke."
The line went dead.
I slipped the phone back into my bag. My heart was hammering. I'd just crossed an irreversible political line. Initiating an illegal surveillance operation on a council envoy was a guaranteed path to execution if I was caught.
I didn't care. I was half-tethered to her whether either of us had consented to it, and whatever the bond had already threaded into my instincts had made the calculation before I could think it through rationally.
I walked back into the arena. Hayes and Chris were bent over the tablet, the campus blueprint glowing on the screen.
"Surveillance is operational," I said. "We'll have an initial intelligence feed within the hour. What's the immediate play?"
"Securing the physical perimeter," Chris said, pointing to the blue dot representing the junior dorms. "Wren is in room 314 with a human roommate. It's an unwarded, unacceptable vulnerability. That standard door lock might as well be wet paper."
"We can't move her into the legacy pack house," Hayes argued. "The conspicuous relocation of a broken-bond omega into the center of legacy power triggers every rumor alarm on campus within an hour. Trent will know we're hoarding her."
"He already knows," I said. "He spelled out the three signatures on her skin in the courtyard. The subtlety is gone, Hayes. If he decides to bypass the legal route and hire mercenaries to grab her from the dorms while we're separated in class, we can't stop them."
The thought paralyzed all three of us.
A high-speed extraction. A violent abduction in the middle of the night. the kind of brutal efficiency the Northern packs were infamous for when they wanted an asset badly enough.
"We move her tomorrow morning," Hayes decided, the Heir in him dropping the pretense of playing by diplomatic rules. "No council notification. No housing authority permission. She moves into the warded inner sanctum of the pack house. My suite."
"Under what pretext?" Chris asked.
"Altruistic protection," I said, constructing the cover on the spot. "The public altercation with the envoy left the omega psychologically traumatized. As the ranking legacy alphas on campus, we offered her a warded scent room for her recovery. An act of Northern charity."
"A coordinated kidnapping framed as charity," Chris summarized flatly.
"We tell her it's temporary," Hayes said, low guilt bleeding into his voice. "Just until the immediate threat from Trent passes. But once she's inside the inner wards, she's untouchable. We can regulate her scent. We can protect the Pack-Heart secret."
The three of us stood in silence under the harsh arena lights. The weight of the decision settling over us.
We were pulling her out of the mixed-species world she'd fled to, and putting her into the very center of the legacy power structure she was terrified of.
But it was the only way to keep the Northern wolves away from her door.
We were her perimeter. And starting tomorrow morning, we were going to build her an impenetrable one.