Chapter 13
Garrett
The images hit somewhere past Little Rock.
I’m four hours in, the highway flat and empty, the country station playing something I’m not listening to.
Her heat has been riding me since I left — manageable, directional, the pull of closing distance.
My wolf has been settled since the state line, his attention forward, no more argument about whether to go.
Then the flood arrives.
Not her anger — I know her anger, it’s been a flavor I’ve carried for days, familiar enough that I’ve built a kind of tolerance for it. This is different. A table. A light fixture, fluorescent, flickering. Hands in latex gloves reaching toward something small.
“Fuck!” I get the truck to the shoulder before my hands stop working.
Gravel grinds under the tires. I cut the engine.
The images keep coming. A room with no windows.
A voice, flat, noting something clinical — a sample number.
A needle, something sharp. And underneath the images, something that has no image.
A hopelessness so complete it has no bottom.
The hopelessness of something too small to understand why it hurts and why nobody comes.
Then her voice. Not words. The force of them. Fury aimed at me, no language needed.
This is yours, you bastard. You built the road that took her there. Feel it.
I feel it.
My hands slide off the wheel. I’m leaning forward with my forehead against the dash, and the images keep coming. I don’t shut them out. I don’t try.
The needle going in. The restraints too large. A voice: hold the arm, she’s moving too much—
She. A girl. Small enough that the equipment had to be modified.
My stomach clenches. I fling the door open, stumble out of the truck, and throw up on the gravel. The images keep coming, and I continue to retch.
When it ends — minutes, or longer — I’m bent over with my hands on my thighs, trying to breathe.
The air is cold against my face. I touch my cheek, and my hand comes away damp.
I look at it for a moment because Garrett Forrester hasn’t cried since Maren’s funeral, when he still believed tears changed something.
Briar is still there. The fury, undimmed. Hate simmering, undiminished.
And I can’t blame her.
I ran a corridor so no child on my land would die the way my sister died.
I ran a corridor that put children on tables.
Sample four-seven-two. That’s what they called her. My corridor gave them the number.
I stay on the shoulder while traffic moves past. A semi. A pickup with its lights on high. Eventually, I straighten up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist. I slide back into the front seat, reach for the water bottle, and rinse my mouth. I spit out the window. I feel unclean.
The country station plays on. I turn it off and start the engine.
Six hours left.
She pushed those images at me because she wanted me to feel it. I fucking felt it.
She expected a wall. An excuse. An alpha chalking it up to duty or necessity.
I didn’t close the door. I don’t know if she registered that. But she’s still there, and the fury is still burning, and under the fury — faint, not acknowledged, barely present — something that isn’t only rage.
Her wolf.
Go, mine says.
I pull back onto the highway. Set the cruise. The road opens north in the dark, straight and empty, and six hours from now it ends at a gate I have no right to walk through.
My wolf doesn’t care about rights. He knows where she is, and he’s done waiting.
We drive.