Chapter 5
Garrett
The first thing I see is a goddamn rabbit. A kid’s stuffed toy with beady little eyes. It’s on the floor in front of me, close enough to touch if my hands were free.
My hands are not free.
I’m in a chair. Solid — bolted, from the feel of it, because when I pull against the restraints, nothing shifts.
My wrists are strapped to the arms, my ankles to the legs, a strap firm across my chest. The wrist cuffs are angled wrong for a shift.
Somebody who knows wolf anatomy did this.
My bones can’t lengthen. Joints can’t contort.
But that’s not the worst of it.
I’m naked. The wood of the chair is rough against my bare back. The air finds every part of me.
“What the fuck?” My wolf’s first response is a hot, rolling fury. A dominant male, stripped and put on display. Unacceptable. I tug at the restraints, muscles straining. I want to tear the chair apart.
I can’t. Whoever built this knew what they were building. So the fury sits under my skin with nowhere to go.
A low growl builds deep in my chest.
Something catches my attention, and my head shoots up.
I’m not alone.
There’s a woman in a chair across the room. She’s been watching me for a while. I can feel the weight of it, the stillness of a room where someone hasn’t moved in a long time. Waiting. She was waiting for me to wake up, and now that I have, she’s in no hurry.
Small. Dark-haired. Gray eyes that give me nothing. Practical clothes. A knife on the table beside her. Clean blade. Sharp.
My wolf stops thrashing.
It isn’t that the fury fades. Something else overrides it. The animal in me, in the middle of his rage, goes still. Lifts his attention from the ropes, from the room, from the indignity of being naked and tied, and fixes on her.
My nostrils flare.
The pull is physical. Behind my ribs. Low in my gut. Every hair on my body stands up. The beast who has obeyed me without question for most of my life is suddenly doing something I did not authorize.
Showing interest in a way that has nothing to do with my current dilemma.
For fuck’s sake, the woman looks like she wants to kill me. Why does she have to smell so good?
I crush the response. The wolf goes quiet.
He doesn’t go away. He’s taking her in. The light muscling of her tanned forearms. The smooth sweep of her forehead toward hair that’s thick enough to need taming. Her plain, black T-shirt pulls snuggly across her full chest.
“Who are you? What the fuck is going on here?” My voice comes out rough. The drug is still thick in my throat.
She watches me. Doesn’t answer.
The silence stretches. I’ve used this tactic myself — in my study, with wolves who’ve crossed a line they shouldn’t have crossed. Let the quiet build. Let them fill it.
She’s using it on me.
“What do you want?” My voice is sharper now.
Still no answer.
I test the restraints. Right wrist. Left. Ankles. Chest strap. Nothing gives.
“Goddammit,” I growl, not to her, but to the insanity of the situation.
Her eyes flick to the window, then back at me.
There’s something about her that pings my radar.
Wolf, I’m guessing, but that’s not surprising around here.
What is surprising is that she took me out.
Picked me off at the one point my guard would be down.
She’s been watching me. Tracking my movements.
“You’re the one in the hills,” I say. “The one my sentry couldn’t catch.”
Her posture adjusts a fraction. She wanted me to know. That’s part of it.
I try to read her through the fog the drug left behind.
My blood in the air, the residue still working through my system — the cabin is too saturated to get a clean line on her.
Wolf, yes. The bloodline underneath, muddied.
But she came here. Tracked me, took me, built this.
And the only reason I can think of is the shitstorm around the Forrester corridor.
“Are you magic-blooded?”
She looks at me. Says nothing.
She’s not denying it.
In hostile territory, with a knife on the table and a man strapped to a chair, a magic-blood doesn’t announce herself. The silence is its own answer. I leave it there.
She straightens her legs, stands, and crosses the room slowly.
Each step is something I feel in the floorboards under my feet before I hear it.
She crouches in front of the rabbit. Her fingers close around it with a care that doesn’t match anything else about her.
For a second, her hand on the matted fur stays still, and I see something she didn’t mean me to see: a muscle working in her jaw, a shift in her shoulders that isn’t composure.
It passes. By the time she stands with the rabbit in her hand, she is iron again.
She walks to me. Stops close.
Her scent reaches me. Wolf and woman. And something beneath it that my wolf is reaching for. Automatic, urgent, without thought. I brace against it. It doesn’t help.
She holds the rabbit up. Eye level.
“Do you know what this is?” Her voice is low and flat.
“A toy.”
Her eyes narrow. “It belonged to a child. The child’s things were put in a cardboard box at a facility south of San Antonio. Filed by code. Codes for feeder regions. This box was coded F-7.”
She lets the name sit. I say nothing.
“F-7 is your corridor. Your junction.”
I know. I have known the corridor since before it had a code. I have never seen it stamped on a box with a child’s rabbit inside.
“I don’t know anything about a facility.”
“You didn’t before. Now you do.” Her eyes don’t leave mine. “That’s why I’m here. For those who went through your corridor.”
I take a slow breath. “Figured as much.”
She doesn’t seem impressed by my response.
“How many of them were children?” The question is quiet and comes unexpectedly. But she’s not asking to wound. She’s taking inventory — measuring what I know against what I should know.
I hold her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Three words. True. She hears it. A man who kept the schedule in his head, who knew every transfer date, every contact call — and never knew that one specific number. I ran the system so I wouldn’t have to. My guilt is real, and it has no faces in it.
She sets the rabbit on my thigh.
The small weight of it lands against my bare skin like a hand. The button eyes point up at me. I can’t look away, and I don’t want to look at it.
“I’m going to tell you about one of them,” she says. “And while I tell you, I’m going to cut you. Just one. It’s not for pain. It’s so you carry him on your skin for an afternoon. That’s less than he carried. But it’s what I can give you today.”
She picks up the knife from the table. “The blade is silver,” she says. “It’s going to leave a mark. If it gets a chance to heal.” She tests its weight in her palm the way you test a tool that’s part of your hand. No performance. No display.
Common sense tells me that I should be recoiling as she moves closer.
I’m not. My nostrils flare, and not for the first time.
She crouches in front of me. Takes my left arm. Her hand closes around my wrist above the cuff — warm, steady, her palm pressing the bones into place. Her thumb finds my pulse and stays there.
She can feel my heartbeat through my skin. I sense it in the way she focuses on her thumb for a moment.
“Number Forty-Seven,” she says. Her voice drops. Not softer. More contained. “A boy. Five, maybe six. 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 someone asked him what to call him, he held up four fingers. Then he held up seven.”
I stop breathing, attention fixed on her.
“F-7, 47. He knew himself by your code.”
The knife shivers. The first tell I’ve seen from her.
“He’s five,” she says. Her voice has gone very quiet. “He didn’t know his name. He knew your code.”
She cuts. Inside of the forearm. Clean, shallow, a line about three inches long.
The pain is bright and specific, nothing like a fight wound — smaller, closer, delivered by a hand that’s still holding me steady.
Blood beads, then tracks down my wrist and over the cuff, and drips onto the dirt floor.
She doesn’t move. Her hand stays on me. Her thumb stays on my pulse. Her breath goes out of her all at once, and for a second, I don’t think she’s going to move at all.
Then she looks up at me, locking onto me with those unsettling silver-gray eyes.
“It’s how they got the magic out.” Her throat works. “They thought it ran in their veins.”
My attention is still focused on her, but for some reason, it’s not just because of the blade. Which is just about as fucked up as I could possibly be.
She sets the knife on her thigh. Still doesn’t release my wrist. She breathes out, slow, and I feel her thumb tremble once against my pulse before she lifts her hand away.
She sits back on her heels.
“He’s at the ranch now,” she says. Flat again. Iron back in place. “A healer has him. They call him Sparrow because nobody knows what else to call him.”
I should say something. I know I should say something.
But what the fuck do I say?
Her hand is off my wrist. And for some reason, absence is worse than the contact.
The silence stretches. She’s still there, watching. Waiting for something I’m not giving her — a defense, a wall she can push against. I don’t have one. There’s no right response to the reality of a boy who held up four fingers and seven because he thought that was his name.
“Say something.” Low. Not quite controlled. Like it got out before she decided to let it.
I look at her. “Is there anything I could say that would fix this?”
She blinks. Once. Something moves across her face — not the cold anger from before. Something that tells me this isn’t what she planned for. Then she’s on her feet, and the distance is back, and whatever that was is gone, locked down fast.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” She stiffens. “I watched you at that stone. You knew. You just decided it wasn’t your weight to carry.”
She steps back twice, and I feel the distance stretch.
“Are you going to kill me?” It’s a practical question, I guess.
“I don’t know yet. Killing you is a mercy I haven’t decided you deserve.
” Her lips tighten. They’re plump, and I don’t know why I notice that.
“The ones at that facility didn’t die fast. Some didn’t die at all.
Some of them are at the ranch now, learning to eat with a spoon and sleep without screaming. So I’m not giving you fast.”
She cradles the rabbit in one hand. Crosses to the door.
“I’m going to walk out. I’m going to bar the door behind me.
But I’m going to come back. I don’t know when.
Could be an hour. Could be more. You’ll sit here, and you’ll think about the boy who held up four fingers and seven.
You’ll think about what he slept on. What his mother sounded like calling him home for dinner, if he ever had one.
What his name was before you gave him a code. ”
She pauses.
“When I come back, you’re going to tell me whether the corridor was worth it. Whether those people deserved what you did.”
She sets the rabbit on the floor. Button eyes facing me. Matted fur.
“Wait—”
She doesn’t.
The door opens. Closes. A bar scrapes into place outside — timber settling into its brackets. The cabin is empty except for me. My arm is bleeding. The pull of her scent thinning slowly in the air.
I sink back into my seat and consider my options. There aren’t many right now, but I twist against the cuffs she’s bound me with, ignoring the mark she left on me that means more than my pain.
The rabbit watches me.
I watch the rabbit.
And the blood drips.