Avenging the Pack (Dragonblood Dynasty #11)

Chapter 1

Briar

I wrap the rabbit in a flannel shirt and tuck it into the bottom of my pack.

Button eyes, matted fur, one ear worn down to a nub by hands too small to be careful.

It came from a cardboard box in the Syndicate facility’s storage room, filed alongside shoes, and drawings, and a child’s jacket with the zipper still done up.

Each box had a number, not a name. Each box held everything a victim was carrying when they arrived, taken at intake and put away with the tidiness of people who kept meticulous records.

I took the rabbit during the extraction. No one stopped me. The corridors were filling with smoke, Jericho’s fire turning the sky orange, and the bastards who ran the place were too busy dying or running to notice one woman walking out with a stuffed animal.

No one’s asked me about it since. No one asks Briar much of anything, which is one of the advantages of being the kind of person who answers in monosyllables and keeps her door locked.

I open the pack and check the contents. Knife, med kit, zip ties, tranquilizer kit.

Merric’s stores have a wolf-grade sedative strong enough to drop an elephant.

Or an alpha. I “requisitioned” two doses yesterday from the equipment locker while Dane was at the barn.

He won’t notice them missing. No one inventories Merric’s field supplies this soon after an operation.

The cabin is already stripped. Bed bare, closet empty, nothing on the walls. It looked this way when I moved in, and it looks this way now, because I never unpacked. My bag sat beside the cot the way it always sits—positioned, not settled. Ready.

I spoke to Arden at dawn.

She was outside the healers’ building with Lachlan beside her, the two of them sitting on the step in the early light. He was whittling. She was staring at nothing, which is what Arden does when her mind is somewhere else.

I sat on the step below her.

“I need to talk about the storage room,” I said. “The boxes.”

Her eyes came back from wherever they’d been. Lachlan’s knife went still.

“What about them?” she said.

“The intake records. How were they organized?”

“By origin point.” No hesitation. “Codes for each feeder region. Every wolf that came through a specific corridor was tagged on arrival. The Forresters were one. Code F-7.”

I had a notebook out, small and spiral-bound, the kind you can fit in a jacket pocket. I wrote F-7 and underlined it twice.

“The items in the boxes,” I said. “Were they inventoried?”

“Down to the last sock.” Her voice didn’t change. “They put it all on the intake form.”

“The wolves themselves,” I said. “Were they tracked the same way? Codes instead of names?”

“Numbers.” She said it flat, like a fact about weather. “Once you came through intake, your name was gone. I was Two-Nineteen.”

I wrote it down. Arden—219.

“Some of them I knew by their real names,” she said. “Others, only by numbers. It depended on when they came in, how long they’d been there, whether they still remembered who they were.” She paused, sorting through memory the way the facility sorted through its files.

“Josiah Whitcross was Two-Twelve. Ravenclaw. Older wolf, maybe sixty. He kept a calendar scratched into the wall behind his cot with a piece of wire. He told me he had a daughter named Esme who was taken six months before him. She was One-Eighty-Nine.” A brief pause.

“She didn’t make it through the first winter. ”

I wrote both names. Both numbers.

“He didn’t make it out?” I asked.

“Died fourteen days before the extraction. Infection that developed into sepsis. They didn’t treat it. He’d probably outlived his usefulness.”

Lachlan’s whittling knife rested on the step beside him now. His hand stayed on Arden’s shoulder.

“There was a boy,” Arden said, and her voice thinned for the first time.

“Small. Five, maybe six. Number Forty-Seven. He’d been there longer than me.

The older captives said he came in as a toddler.

He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know he had a name.

When I asked what to call him, he held up four fingers and then seven. ”

I didn’t write that down.

“He was F-7,” Arden said. “Forrester’s corridor.”

I looked at the number on my page, at the dash beside it where a name should be. Forty-Seven.

“He’s in the children’s room,” she said. “Sable has him. They’re calling him Sparrow, because he won’t pick a name for himself and they had to call him something.”

I nodded once.

“Anyone else?” I asked.

She recited them like an inventory of her own. Methodical. Complete.

Ruthie Hartwell, number One-Ninety-Three. Twelve years old when she went in, fourteen when she came out. She had braided strips of cloth from her mattress and kept them tied around her wrist because they were the only thing in the room that was hers.

A woman called Nell, number Eighty-Eight. No surname. She didn’t speak. Arden said it was trauma, but some said the scientists severed her vocal cords when they couldn’t stop her screaming.

Three children under the age of ten listed as numbers Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, and Thirty-Three.

Brought in on the same truck. Different code: F-7.

Separated on arrival. Two among the rescued.

The third moved past the second set of doors eight months ago, the doors they didn’t bring people back from.

“That’s everyone I know,” Arden said. “There were more. The facility held over forty at any given time. I only know the ones who were there when I came in, the ones who came after, and the ones the older wolves told me about.”

I counted the names in my notebook. Nine entries. Five with names, four with only numbers. Two confirmed dead. One missing past the second doors. Six among those we recovered.

I closed the notebook and slid it into my jacket.

Arden nodded. Lachlan’s hand remained on her shoulder, steady and grounding. I stood and walked away, because I had what I needed, and staying longer would have meant watching her sit with it.

I don’t have room for that.

A sound at the cabin door. I look up. Willow is passing on the path outside. She pauses, reading the open door as unusual, because it is. I keep my door closed. Always.

She sees me. Sees what I’m doing, the pack, the stripped room.

“Need something?” I ask.

“No. Just checking in.”

I don’t respond. She moves on. She doesn’t ask anything else.

I wait until her footsteps fade, then shoulder the pack and step outside.

I pass the children’s room on my way across the yard. The door is propped open—Sable’s new policy. No doors will ever be locked to these children again.

Inside, Mia is on her cot, sitting up with her knees drawn close, silent and watchful. She sees me in the doorway and holds my gaze.

She doesn’t speak. Hasn’t spoken since the facility. Maybe she can’t. Maybe she won’t.

But her eyes follow me, and after a moment she lifts a red rubber ball. She’s not offering it. Just showing me that it’s hers.

I give her a small smile and add a wink for good measure.

She doesn’t react, but she doesn’t look away either.

The rabbit shifts faintly in my pack when I turn, a small, soft weight that doesn’t belong to me.

It belonged to a child.

There’s no name attached to it. Just a code.

F-7.

That code leads to a corridor. The corridor leads to a junction on a county road in the Texas Hill Country. And that junction leads to a man.

Not the man who ran the facility. Not the ones who strapped wolves to tables or drew blood.

The man who made sure the system worked.

Garrett Forrester.

Brenna and Merric have been working with those ledgers, building a case for the council hearing that will make it public record.

Names, dates, payments. The premium for younger wolves.

The financial trail that connects the Forrester operation to a network spanning six states.

It will all be official, eventually. Part of the political machinery they’re building toward a reckoning with Nathan Bern.

It’s not enough.

A hearing is words in a room. Garrett Forrester is still in his compound, still breathing the air of the territory he maintained, and somewhere in the system he fed, there are more boxes. More shoes. More rabbits with button eyes.

I reach the truck and open the door.

I could hand this over. Let Brenna finish building it. Let Merric take it through the channels they’ve been putting in place. Let the council decide what justice looks like.

But that leaves him where he is.

Not good enough.

I stow the pack behind the passenger seat and climb in. The keys are in my jacket. The route is already set—through Arkansas, south through the flats, into the Hill Country.

I know the terrain around the Forrester compound.

I spent two weeks on those ridgelines with Willow, tracking scent trails through the brush, scouting approaches the sentries didn’t cover.

I know where the gaps are. I know which trails run close to the boundary without crossing it.

I know the eastern approach because I walked it in the dark.

And I know Garrett Forrester rides that boundary alone.

I saw him ride out on a bay horse, no escort, heading for a point on the ridge where a marker stone sits under an old live oak. He stayed for twenty minutes. Then he rode back.

He did the same thing a week later.

A man alone. A routine. A vulnerability.

I start the engine. The ranch recedes in the mirror—lodge, cabins, smoke rising from Greta’s kitchen, wolves moving between buildings. Safe. Rebuilding. The slow work of putting something back together after it’s been torn apart.

That’s what they’re doing here.

It isn’t what I do.

Merric used to say I was born in the wrong form—that the wolf fit better than the woman. He wasn’t wrong.

I’ve spent more of my life on four legs than two, running territory no one else wanted. The few times I’ve tried to do something different, it never held.

This does.

This is a hunt. That’s something I was born for.

But this time, I’m tracking something with teeth.