26. Still Getting Started #2
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.
Coming Next:
Bound to the Shadow Guard
The Pack Guard Agency Series, Book 2
I was sent to protect a woman who doesn't believe she needs protecting.
Not claim her. Not want her. Definitely not recognize my wolf in the half-second before she does.
I'm Pack Guard intelligence, and I don't make mistakes in the field. Elise Arden is the coolest negotiator in the Conclave—and the target of a network that wants her sold to the highest bloodline bidder.
Then she takes my hand, and my wolf stops taking orders from me.
Fated mate. The one woman trained never to need anyone, now stuck needing me to keep her alive.
She thinks the danger is external—a leak in her own circle, feeding her schedule to people who see her as an asset to be claimed instead of a woman to be believed. She's wrong about how close it already is.
Then I learn the truth.
The closer I get to finding her enemy, the harder it gets to remember I was only ever supposed to guard her door—not stand on the other side of it, hoping she'll open it for me.
And when I find out who's selling her...
they'll learn I don't lose the people I've already decided are mine.
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Keep reading for a sneak peek at Chapter One.
Bound to the Shadow Guard
Chapter 1: Gravity Tilted
ELISE
The lobby smelled like floor polish and old money.
7:42 a.m.
Same as every morning for three years.
Marble floors. Eduardo at the concierge desk, already nodding at me the way he did every day—like nothing in the world could go wrong on his watch.
"Ms. Arden."
Same greeting. Same easy nod.
"Eduardo." I set my coffee on the ledge beside him long enough to free a hand for my briefing notes. "Quiet morning?"
"So far."
Two exits.
Main entrance.
Service corridor behind the mail room.
I'd clocked them on move-in day and never stopped.
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.
He crossed the threshold and swept the lobby in one pass.
Not casual.
A read.
Exits. Sightlines. Cover.
Cataloged in the time it took most people to decide where to put their eyes.
Then his gaze found mine.
And stayed.
Two seconds past anything professional.
I counted them.
Counting was what I did in rooms where I didn't hold the variables.
One.
Two.
It didn't help.
Heat bloomed low beneath my sternum.
Sudden.
Sharp.
Unmistakably placed.
Like the floor had tilted one degree toward him and my whole body felt the slope before my mind agreed to it.
Thirty years in curated rooms, and I had never once felt gravity pick a direction for me.
My wolf didn't stir.
She surged.
Warm. Certain. Almost unbearable.
The way breath comes back after you've held it too long.
Like she'd been waiting eight years for exactly this and had just been handed it.
Adrenaline, I told myself.
The threats.
The meeting.
A man who was good at being looked at.
I was wrong.
I just didn't know it yet.
He crossed the lobby and held out a hand.
"Ms. Arden. Gideon Cross, Pack Guard Agency."
Even voice.
Controlled.
A man who'd spent years sanding the tells out of himself in rooms that punished tells.
I recognized the work because I'd done the same thing to myself for decades.
I took his hand.
His fingers closed around mine.
His jaw tightened.
There and gone.
A fraction I almost missed.
His eyes shifted, something going very still behind them, like a man bracing a door shut from the inside.
His hand was warmer than mine.
Mine had run cold for years, keeping her quiet.
The contact lasted three seconds.
Four.
When he let go, the warmth stayed pressed into my palm like a thumbprint.
I was still aware of it four minutes later, when I had no business being aware of anything but the brief.
He handed me his credentials without ceremony.
Pack Guard intelligence division.
Assigned to my security for the Veil Summit.
One operative—because a team made protection visible, and visible protection told everyone there was something worth protecting.
"You know what I actually do here?" I asked. "Before we get to the cover story."
"Independent negotiator, Arden bloc."
Flat delivery.
Like he was reading a report rather than guessing.
"Charter disputes. Trade corridor rights. Mediation between packs that won't sit in a room together without someone neutral running it. Nine agreements closed in three years—four after Council mediators had already walked away."
"Then you know why my father hates that I'm good at it."
"I know why the wrong people love it."
His eyes didn't leave mine.
"An Arden who negotiates without her father's leash is worth more to a rival bloc than anything he'd hand them directly. You're not the asset because you're an Arden."
A beat.
"You're the asset because of what you can make disappear across a table—tariffs, territory claims, blood debts—without anyone's name attached to the deal."
"That's not in my public record."
"No."
His voice stayed level.
"It's in the file that got you three death threats."
I hadn't expected him to say it plainly.
Most people who understood my function well enough to name it out loud also understood better than to say so to my face.
Then he opened the cover brief.
"Old Conclave law makes an unaffiliated, unmated female negotiator from a rival bloodline a viable acquisition target at a gathering this size."
His tone didn't move.
"Eighteen documented cases in forty years. Your threat signature matches the pattern."
I kept my face still.
I'd known about the acquisition laws since I was nineteen—since my father explained, without any particular feeling, that my worth to the Arden pack would be decided partly by which alliance I could be traded into.
Eleven years spent making myself too valuable to trade cheaply.
"Your timeline's too compressed to be credible," I said. "Six months of relationship, no public sightings? The Conclave's diplomatic corps has photographers at every function. There are records of me attending alone."
"Then we build the backstory today."
No hesitation.
"Where you met me. What convinced you. I need it airtight by tonight."
"And the intimacy the cover requires reads as faction alignment."
I held his eyes.
"I've spent eight years building independent standing. My father will weaponize the first summit photograph within forty-eight hours—proof I've chosen a side. I'll lose access I spent years earning."
"Then we control what the photograph shows."
He didn't blink.
"I don't need you to perform devotion. I need three things visible in every frame: proximity, familiarity, and a claim mark your father will recognize as real. The rest is noise."
"A mark isn't something you fake for a camera."
"No."
His voice went quieter.
"It isn't."
"Then how exactly do you plan to produce one?"
For the first time since he'd walked into the lobby, Gideon went completely still.
Not professionally still.
Something deeper.
His eyes held mine.
"My wolf recognized you the second I walked through that door."
Everything inside me stopped.
My own wolf surged against my ribs.
Hard enough to steal a breath.
I kept my face steady through sheer habit.
"You're saying—"
"I'm saying yours recognized me too."
Heat moved through my chest.
My wolf pressed harder.
Traitor.
"You're telling me we're mates."
"I'm telling you the possibility is real."
His gaze didn't move.
"And if I'm right, we don't manufacture a claim. We control when the world sees it."
I stared at him.
"You're basing an operational cover on instinct."
"I'm basing it on two wolves that reacted before either of us had time to lie about it."