Chapter 2
Garrett
The compound is too quiet. Not the physical quiet — the dogs are barking at the barn cats, the generator is running, and somewhere behind the meeting hall, one of the younger wolves is splitting firewood with the steady thud of someone who’s been told to stay busy. What’s missing is underneath.
I cross the yard with my coffee. Ellis is hauling water to the chicken coop.
“Morning, Alpha.” He nods.
I nod back, raising my coffee mug in a caffeine salute. Just as I usually do. But something is still not right.
Two of the families who used to take breakfast at the long table in the mess hall are carrying their plates back to the north cabins. They’ve been doing that for three mornings.
The rhythm is off. I’ve walked this yard every day for most of my life. I know when it’s humming, and I know when it isn’t. Right now it isn’t.
My wolf has been pacing since I woke. Restless. Directionless. Like an animal with a splinter it can’t lick out.
Three days since Conner walked. The pack is recalibrating.
That’s all this is.
I tell myself that, but the wolf keeps pacing.
The meeting hall smells like yesterday’s coffee. Dawes is at the far end of the long pine table with the patrol maps spread and weighted at the corners with river stones. Thermos at his elbow. The lid is off. He’s on his second cup.
Mid-twenties. He’s run boundary patrols since he was nineteen. When Conner walked, he stepped into the gap without asking. Competency is wired into him.
“Mornin’, Alpha,” he says, without looking up.
I set my coffee on the table. “What’s the status?”
“Eastern boundary’s clean. South and west, nothing. I doubled the rotation on the north approach like you asked.” He turns the map toward me and traces a line with his finger. “Moved Jessie’s group to the creek crossing for the day shift. Gives us overlapping coverage with the south patrol.”
“Good. The junction?”
“Nobody’s been near it.” He pauses. Pulls the lid back onto the thermos. “I put Cal down there yesterday. Says the road’s been dead since Tuesday. No vehicles, no contact.”
The junction. The gravel pullout where the county road bends around the limestone shelf.
Where the trucks came.
I don’t think about where the trucks went. That wasn’t our operation. Never was.
Wasn’t your concern.
I push the thought down and study the map. It’s been a lot harder to believe that lately.
“Keep Cal there. Rotating shifts. Eyes on it around the clock.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Dawes takes a drink. Sets the thermos down at the angle he picked it up. He’s got something on his mind. He keeps glancing at a point on the map that doesn’t need looking at. “There’s one more thing.”
“Say it.”
“Conner’s weapons kit. He cleaned it before he left. Stripped, oiled, organized. Sidearm, field knife, tranq kit. Everything racked.”
I wait.
“He left his keys to the ranch house on the study desk. I found them when I was pulling the patrol maps yesterday morning.”
“I saw them,” I say. I take a sip of my coffee. Set the mug down. “Think it’s time you checked on the yearlings we brought in yesterday.”
Subject closed.
He nods. Picks up the map and the thermos. Walks out. The screen door eases shut behind him because he catches it with his heel. Dawes doesn’t let doors slam.
I stand there with my hand on the table.
A compromised man runs. A man making a choice folds his affairs.
Conner folded his affairs.
I take my coffee outside. The morning is warm already — Hill Country warm, the dry heat that builds early.
Jessie has six of the younger fighters working close-quarters on the training ground east of the equipment barn.
She moves through them quietly, adjusting a grip with two fingers on a wrist, moving on before anyone has time to say thank you.
She sees me cross the yard and nods. The nod is correct — respectful, professional, the nod she’s given me every morning for a decade.
But her eyes hold a beat longer than they used to. A question she hasn’t formed the words for.
I nod back and keep walking.
Ridley is in her stall, saddled. One of the hands anticipated me.
I lead her out and mount up in the yard.
She takes the ranch track without guidance.
Past the south pasture where the Herefords are standing in the shade of the single live oak that survived the last drought.
Through the cedar break where the limestone pushes up through the soil. Up the long slope to the ridge.
I let the reins go slack. My thighs do the work.
Which means the thoughts come. They always come on this ride.
Conner two nights ago. Calm, which made it worse. Conner angry I know how to manage. I’ve been redirecting his anger since he was fifteen. Conner calm is somebody I haven’t met. I think of his voice on the phone during our final call:
A three-year-old girl. She sleeps holding my finger because I’m the first person who didn’t hurt her.
The wolf stirs under my skin.
I tighten the reins. Conner is compromised. The magic-blood turned him. One child does not invalidate a system that has kept three generations of Forresters alive on this ground.
The wolf doesn’t respond to that. The wolf keeps pacing.
Ridley tops the ridge and stops without being asked. The marker stone sits under the live oak where it’s sat since the memorial service. Limestone, about two feet high, the surface smooth.
I dismount. Ground-tie Ridley. Sit on the rock shelf beside the stone.
The Hill Country stretches below, pastures going amber. The creek. The compound rooflines through the trees. My grandfather’s land. My father’s land. Mine now.
I touch the stone. My palm finds the place it always finds, where the weather has worn the limestone smoothest. The gesture is older than thought.
I was twenty-one when the call came. One of the townsfolk, telling me a girl had been found on the east trail, and she was alive, but there was magic involved, and we needed to come quickly.
We didn’t get there quickly enough.
My sister was on that trail.
A stray wolf was moving through our territory, a young male who didn’t know how to control the power he was carrying let a ward loose. The magic hit Maren and her horse, and neither stood a chance.
She was fourteen.
Conner held her. He was the one who got there first. I just got there for the aftermath. That was enough.
But not enough from me. I should have been there. I should have seen what that wolf was and gotten the bastard off our land.
Too late now, Forrester.
I shut the memory down. It waits here, at the stone, every time. I know its tricks. Today, it is not going to get more than this.
The corridor. My father started it in the summer after the funeral.
He had contacts he’d never spoken about.
A phone number. A name I was told to memorize and never write down.
Thirty-seven wolves over ten years. I took it over when he stepped back, and I ran it. I was good at it. I made it efficient.
Ten years. Thirty-seven consignments. I never questioned the system.
Clean hands, clean ledger, clean pack.
I touch Maren’s initials with my thumb. The stone was for her.
The corridor was for her. Every wolf who ever left on one of those trucks left for her, because I could not have another dead girl on my ground.
I could not have my mother in the kitchen when the phone rang again.
I could not tell another father that his little girl was gone.
And because I could not, I did not check.
The wolf stays still. Not pacing. Ruminating.
I sit with the stone for twenty minutes. The sun climbs, and the shade starts to pull back. Ridley stamps.
I stand. Mount up.
The ride back is always shorter. I’m a quarter mile from the compound when something catches my eye.
A flash at the junction. Sun on metal. Brief, deliberate, the angle of a signal set for a rider on this particular trail at this particular hour.
I pull Ridley in and watch. Nothing moves. The pullout is empty. No vehicle, no tracks, just the glint of something small in the gravel.
My wolf snaps to attention. I dismount on the ridge and walk Ridley down by the reins.
The flash resolves at ten yards. A hunting knife.
Planted blade-down in the gravel where the trucks used to park, the handle upright, the steel clean.
Not local. Not a pattern I recognize. The kind of knife that comes from a catalog, paid for in cash, carried by the kind of men who pay cash for knives.
Pinned under the blade, weighted against the wind, a folded sheet of paper.
I crouch. Pull the knife free — heavier than it looks, balanced for a grown man’s hand — and lift the paper from the gravel. Plain, unmarked, sealed along the flap with a thumb-press, no tape.
I break the seal with the knife and draw out a single sheet.
Heavy stock. A typed list of dates, running the length of the page. Every handoff from the past three years. I know because I kept the schedule in my head the way I keep everything in my head, and this list matches.
Below the dates, a single line:
We’re reviewing our partnership. Expect contact.
No signature. No header.
I fold the paper back into the envelope. Slide it inside my jacket, against my ribs.
The Syndicate. They know the corridor is compromised. And they’ve stood on my land and left a message, a list of my own dates.
“Fuck,” I mutter, taking off my hat and brushing the back of my hand across my forehead. The sun beats down.
The restlessness that has dogged me since dawn has turned into something else. A threat I need to build around. A problem that needs a plan.
Protect the pack.
I mount up and ride. The same dust that settled behind whoever left the envelope settles behind Ridley’s hooves.
The message sits against my ribs. Light as paper. Heavy as the blade that pinned it down.