Pack Guard Series, Book 2
If You Loved This Book, You'll Love Book 2!
Claimed By The Tracker
Lena Rowe never expected an Ashwood witch's careful instincts to fail her — but when Pack Guard tracker Jace Mercer steps into her case, every threat assessment she's ever run goes quiet beneath something far more dangerous: wanting him.
As a series of killings tied to the Veil Council pulls them deeper into the politics of the supernatural world, the wolf shifter assigned to protect her becomes the one thing she can't predict or control.
Jace knows what his wolf wants the moment he catches her scent, but claiming a witch under Council scrutiny could cost them both everything.
Caught between duty and the bond pulling them together, Lena and Jace must learn to trust each other before the hunt closes in — because the closer they get to the truth, the more certain it becomes that someone wants them dead before they can be claimed.
To Be Released on August 12, 2026.
Not claim her.
Not protect her.
And definitely not crave her the moment I catch her scent.
Lena Rowe crashes into my world in torn silk and defiance, her wild magic licking at my control like a challenge. I track for a living. I don’t miss.
But Lena isn’t just a job.
Every mile she runs pulls me deeper—into her lies, her heat, the way her body reacts when I get too close. One motel room, one night breathing her in, and my wolf stops seeing her as a target… and starts needing her under me, marked by me, mine.
I should bring her in. That’s the mission.
Except the truth changes everything.
She wasn’t being married.
She was being traded.
Now I’m the only thing standing between her and the men who think they own her.
And when they come for her—
they’ll learn exactly what a black wolf does to anyone who tries to take what’s his.
To Be Released on August 12, 2026.
LENA
The coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
But I kept my hands wrapped around the cup like it was the only thing anchoring me. Like cold ceramic could hold me to something real.
6:47 AM.
Sixty miles of Carolina back-road between me and the life I'd just walked away from. The estate outside Asheville was already shrinking in the rearview of a car that wasn't mine. Not enough distance. Never enough.
The diner smelled like burnt grease and freedom.
Fluorescent light buzzed overhead. A cook who hadn't looked up once since I'd slid into the booth. Two truckers asleep over plates of rubbery eggs in the far corner. This was exactly where I needed to be. Nowhere. Anonymous. Safe.
I found the exits without meaning to.
Front door. Kitchen. The side door by the bathrooms. The habit was older than I wanted to think about. Older than the wedding. Older than the secret I'd been keeping with it.
I'd changed in Delaney's backseat somewhere around mile forty.
Jeans. An oversized flannel. Sneakers from the emergency bag I'd kept packed under my bed for four months like a promise I was always planning to keep.
My hair was still half-pinned the way the stylist had left it at five this morning—loose waves falling where they shouldn't, bobby pins digging into my scalp in places I couldn't reach.
Every time I shifted, I felt the ghost of the wedding dress across my shoulders.
Twelve hundred hand-sewn beads. The weight of something I'd refused to carry through a door I was never going to walk through.
I let myself shake. Just for this minute. Just in this booth where no one was watching.
Not from cold. Not from fear, exactly. My magic was doing something under my skin. Restless. Gold heat crackling through my veins like it wanted to break through my knuckles and announce itself to the diner.
It had surged when I walked out of the Rowe estate at 6:03 with my veil still pinned. It had surged again when I crossed the county line. It was surging now. Low and constant. Like it was trying to tell me something I didn't have words for yet.
Twelve years of hiding this.
Twelve years of pressing it down. Swallowing it back. Being the good daughter with the good smile and the power nobody knew about. The power my father had apparently been selling.
I pressed my palms harder against the cold ceramic.
Three hundred and forty dollars in my wallet. Delaney's car in the lot. She didn't know I'd taken it yet. She'd call at eight. I'd rehearsed that conversation six times on the drive and still didn't have it right.
No destination beyond not there.
The state line. A new phone. A place to land that my father's network couldn't map. Someone with enough supernatural standing to look at that contract and tell me it was void. Illegal. Something I could fight.
I didn't know how to do any of that yet.
I only knew I couldn't do it from inside that house.
The diner door opened.
The air pressure changed.
I felt it before I turned. A pressure in my sternum like a hand pushing against the inside of my ribs. My magic surged hot and sudden—reaching, wanting, pulling toward something I couldn't see yet. Toward someone.
It had never done that before. Not once in twelve years.
I kept my eyes on the coffee cup and watched him in my peripheral vision as he came through the door.
Wrong.
He was wrong for this diner in every possible way. Too still. Too deliberate. Dark hair cut short but not carefully. Dark eyes that read almost black in the fluorescent light. A face that looked like it was always one breath from either irritation or violence.
Tall—six-three at least, lean and hard-muscled, built more for pursuit than brute force—and he moved between the booths the way something moves when it already knows where its target is.
Not rushed. Not casual. Certain.
I fixed my smile. The bright, warm, mildly harmless smile I'd been deploying since I was sixteen. The one that said I am approachable and not interesting and certainly not worth stopping for.
The smile that had gotten me through four years of family dinners. Through nine years of knowing what my father had done and pretending I didn't. Through this morning when I'd looked at my reflection in the bridal suite and watched my own face lie.
He sat across from me without being invited.
The booth creaked under his weight.
The smell of him hit me first. Something warm and dark. Pine and leather and underneath it all the unmistakable edge of not quite human. My magic flared without asking permission. Gold warmth crackling at my fingertips inside my fists. Reaching toward him the way it reached toward nothing else.
I closed my fingers tighter around the cup.