Chapter 18
Garrett
The compound smells wrong when I get back.
Not a threat. Just the wrongness of a place that should feel like home and doesn’t, because my wolf has relocated without telling me.
Home is now a woman in the Ozarks, and this — the barn, the house, the fences I’ve been maintaining since I was barely a man — is just the place I’m standing while I figure out what comes next.
Two nights gone. Dawes knew I was leaving, though he didn’t ask where.
He’s not asking now, though he’s reading everything the return is showing him: the scruff, the weight I’ve dropped, the general agitation.
He looks at the silver scars on my forearms, processes them, and moves on. He’s never asked about those either.
“What happened while I was gone?” I ask.
“Cal spotted a vehicle on the south road Tuesday night. Slowed near the junction, didn’t stop. Plates traced to a shell company in Houston.”
Syndicate. Watching the junction. Reminding me they know where we live.
“There’s something else.” Dawes shifts his weight.
The fidget that means he’s been sitting on something he doesn’t like.
“Boundary patrol picked up a stray on the east line this morning. Female. Young. Magic-blooded. She was on foot, moving slow. Ellis said she looked like she’d been running for days. ”
“Where is she now?”
“Still at the boundary. Ellis is with her. He didn’t know what to call it in as. Protocol’s been… he wasn’t sure what the protocol was anymore.”
The protocol. The word I built around the corridor so that moving magic-blooded wolves off Forrester land sounded like filing paperwork.
“I’ll go,” I say.
Ellis is at the east boundary with a woman who looks like the running has nearly finished her.
Early twenties, maybe younger. Thin in the way that happens when a body’s been spending more than it takes in for weeks.
She’s on her feet but barely, her weight against a fence post, watching my approach with the eyes of an animal that’s learned what alphas do.
She’s watching my hands.
I’ve noticed that. Since Briar pushed a child’s nightmare through, and I stood on the roadside with my face wet. I see it everywhere now. Wolves who watch hands instead of faces. Wolves who brace when someone moves toward them. We did that. The purist packs.
I’m not feeling so pure anymore.
“How long have you been running?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“You’re on Forrester land,” I say. “Historically, that’s been a problem for wolves like you.”
Still nothing. Her hands are tight on the fence post.
“We don’t do that anymore,” I say. “There’s no danger to you here.” I stop three feet from her. “I’m telling you this because you should know what’s changed, and because you’ve been standing here long enough.”
Ellis is watching me from ten feet back. Reading the conversation the way Dawes read my return — carefully, without inflection, collecting data.
The woman’s hands loosen on the fence post. Fractionally.
“What do you want?” she says. Barely there.
“To get you food and let you rest before you decide what’s next. That’s all.” I look at Ellis. “Lodge. Ask my mother to feed her.”
Ellis moves. His pace matches hers when she pushes off the post — unhurried, a body-length between them, his hands visible.
Jessie is at the training yard. She’s seen it. She comes across when the woman is out of earshot.
“That was different,” she says.
“The protocol is finished. What we had in place is finished.” I watch the woman walk toward the lodge with Ellis. “She needed food, and she needed to stop running. That’s all.”
“And if more come?”
“Then we feed them, and we don’t call the contact number.”
Jessie is quiet for a moment. The same careful look from the fence line, the one I couldn’t read then. I can read it now. She’s deciding whether what she’s seeing is collapse or construction.
“The hearings are coming,” she says. “Conner’s testimony. The ledger. Brenna Corvus is building a case that’s going to lay all of this out in front of every pack in the southern territories.”
“I know.”
“Some of the pack have been talking. Not just the ones who left — the ones who stayed. They’re hearing what Conner’s been saying. They’re looking at you and trying to figure out which version is true.”
“Both versions are true. The version where I protected this pack for five years, and the version where I fed wolves into a machine. At the same time.”
She takes this in. Considers it.
“What are you going to do when the hearings happen?”
“Tell the truth.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“That’ll destroy the Forrester name.”
“The Forrester name has been destroying other people for a decade. Maybe it’s time it took some of the damage.”
“The Syndicate,” she says. “They’re not going to wait for the hearings.”
“No. They’ll move before the hearings make the corridor public. Right now, they can threaten to expose us. After the hearings, there’s nothing left to expose.”
“You think they’ll hit us?”
“The pack? Probably not. We’re not worth the resources — we’re a broken supply line, not a threat. But if they want to send a message to the other packs still running corridors…” I look at the yard. The fighters on the mat. “They’d come for me.”
Jessie is quiet for a beat. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It might.”
“Garrett—”
“If it does, it does.” I look at her. “But no more wolves take damage for what I built. Not Forrester. Not anyone. That’s not negotiable.”
She holds my eyes for a moment. Nods once. Then she walks back to her group, shoulders tight with something she’s decided not to say.
I stand in the yard and reach for Briar. The press against whatever she keeps closed. I can’t stop. I don’t try to stop anymore.
The closed door doesn’t slam this time. It eases shut.
Slowly. Reluctantly. And in the half-second before it seals, something comes through that isn’t anger.
I store it alongside the feel of her fingers tracing the scar on my forearm while I moved inside her.
The word she whispered — please — that cracked me open more than any knife could. The fact that she stayed.
I walk back to my study and sit at the desk.
The Syndicate is circling. The hearings are coming.
The compound is stretched thin, and the wolves who stayed are going to learn the truth.
Some of them will leave. Three hundred miles north, a woman who carried a stuffed rabbit six hundred miles for revenge is carrying my bite on her neck and going back to her life.
My wolf is quiet. Not restless. Decided.
I sit at the desk and get to work.