Chapter 22
Garrett
I drive back slowly. It’s four hours from the neutral ground to the compound, and I take every mile of it because stopping the truck means arriving, and arriving means the afternoon catches up with me. I’m not ready for it to catch up.
“You good?” asks Dawes.
“Sure.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Nope.”
He nods, then wedges himself into the corner of the passenger side, tugs the brim of his hat down over his eyes, and drops his head back against the window.
Message received.
Thank fuck. Because I’m in no space to answer questions right now.
Her scent is on my shirt. My collar, where her hands straightened it. The fabric over my shoulder, where she bit through the cotton to keep from crying out. Every time the truck hits a bump, I feel the echo of her in a muscle, a bruise, the places she gripped hard enough to mark.
The pull in my chest hasn’t let up since I watched her drive away from the council building with Brenna and Willow.
She’s driving somewhere, too. I can feel the motion of it, the rhythm of a vehicle under her.
Heading back to the Ozarks. The Brenna delegation breaking up, wolves scattering to their territories, the council machinery grinding forward while we both drive away from the place we just chose each other in a storage closet.
She chose me.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, sixty miles of highway at a time.
Not her wolf. Not the heat. Her. The woman who carried a rabbit six hundred miles to make me pay for what I built.
She put her back against a door, pulled me down, opened her mouth under mine, and let me be inside her while she was in full possession of her judgment.
And afterward, when I could have said something stupid, she straightened my collar.
A gesture so small it shouldn’t carry the weight it carries, and it carries every ounce.
I can’t shake the feeling that something’s different about her. A warmth that wasn’t there before. A density to her scent I couldn’t place.
She pushed my hand away when I started to ask.
I don’t press the thought. She’s not ready to tell me, and I’m in no position to demand answers from a woman I just had against a storage room door twenty feet from the council chamber where I confirmed every crime I ever committed.
Dawes is still sleeping, so I take the long way back. Past the junction. The pullout is empty. The road is quiet. The trucks have stopped running, the contact phone has been disconnected for weeks. Anyone watching the junction now sees nothing but a truck slowing briefly and driving on.
They’re still watching. I know they’re watching. The surveillance vehicle Ellis spotted Tuesday night, the shell company plates, the patient machinery of an organization that doesn’t let a supply line disappear without a fight.
Or maybe they will.
We pull up to the gate at dusk.
Ellis is at the fence. That alone tells me something. Ellis doesn’t wait at the gate. If he’s standing at the fence when I pull up, something is wrong.
I kill the engine and get out. He comes around the hood to meet us.
“What?”
“A vehicle came to the compound an hour ago. Dark SUV. Syndicate — same cut of people as before. They didn’t try to come inside. They offloaded something at the gate and drove.”
“Offloaded what?”
“You need to see it.”
He walks. Dawes and I follow.
Past the main gate, into the pasture that fronts the compound, the fence line running north along the road. Fifty yards in, there’s a shape I don’t recognize at first in the failing light. A structure. Wrong-looking.
A cage.
Shit.
Iron bars, welded frame, the kind of construction you’d use to transport large animals. Set on the grass beside the road, where anyone passing would see it.
It’s not empty.
Inside are four people.
A man, maybe thirty-five. A woman beside him.
Two children, a boy and a girl. The family is huddled together in the center of the cage, and when they hear Dawes and me approach, the adults move to shield the children.
The instinctive response of parents who’ve already lived through something terrible and are braced for the next blow.
I stop ten feet from the cage.
The father watches me. His face is bruised, one eye swollen shut, his lip split.
He’s a wolf. I can tell from his scent, from the way his body moves, even through the restraint of being locked in.
The woman is also a wolf. Both children.
A whole family. And under the wolf scent, the sharper, electric undertone my father trained me to identify when I was ten.
Magic-blood. All four of them.
On top of the cage is a folded piece of paper. Dawes hands it to me.
I unfold it.
Block letters. Neat handwriting.
Resume operations. Start with these.
I fold the paper and put it in my pocket.
The father hasn’t stopped watching me. The mother has her arms around both children, her face turned into the girl’s hair.
The boy is looking at me the way I’ve seen wolves look at people who hold their lives in their hands.
Comprehension. The understanding that what happens next is decided by someone outside the cage.
It lands in me. Recognition, not surprise. This is what I built. Not in this specific form, not with a cage on my lawn, but this. The delivery. The choice handed to me in the simplest possible terms.
I look at the father. “How long since you ate?”
“Two days. Maybe three. The kids had some water this morning.”
“Dawes. Bolt cutter.”
He doesn’t ask. Doesn’t hesitate. He goes.
While he’s gone, I stand in the grass with the family, the cage, and the note in my pocket. I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say that means anything until the lock is off. Words without action are what I’ve been trading in for a decade. I’m done with that.
Dawes comes back. I fit the jaws around the padlock — industrial, heavy, the kind meant for livestock — and I squeeze until the lock shears. The cage door swings open.
The family doesn’t move.
I step back. Give them space.
“You can come out. Take whatever time you need. I need to make a call before I can tell you what happens next. Dawes will get you water.”
Dawes disappears toward the equipment shed. I walk fifteen feet down the fence line and pull out my phone. I scroll through the council contacts that I transferred onto this phone years ago. The Ravenclaw number. Never used because they’re magic-blood.
I dial.
It rings. A woman answers. Voice clipped. “Hello.”
“Brenna Corvus?”
“Yes?”
“This is Garrett Forrester.”
“I know. Why are you calling?”
“The Syndicate delivered a family to my gate an hour ago. Two adults, two children. Magic-blood. Intercepted in transit somewhere I don’t know. Beaten but alive. I need a safe place to send them.”
Silence. She’s thinking. I don’t fill it.
“How old are the children?”
“Boy, maybe seven. Girl, five or six.”
“And you’re asking me to take them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I shut down the corridor and the Syndicate wants it reopened. The family was delivered to force the issue. I’m refusing.
I can’t keep them here. When the Syndicate comes, they’ll take the family.
I can’t send them anywhere that the Syndicate can find them.
Ravenclaw has the standing and the protection to keep magic-blood wolves safe openly. I don’t know anywhere else that does.”
A longer silence.
“You’re serious about refusing them.”
“Yes.”
“You understand what that means.”
“Yes.”
“All right. We’ll take the family. I’ll have a team at a rendezvous point tomorrow morning. I’ll text you the location.”
“Thank you.”
“Garrett.”
“Yes?”
“If you’re serious about this, you’re going to need help you don’t have.”
“I know.”
“We can talk about that when the family is safe.”
“Understood.”
“One more thing…”
“Yes?”
“Briar was there today. She came back quiet. Quieter than usual. I’m not asking for details. But whatever is between the two of you is likely to affect what we’re about to do. So I need to know where it stands.”
The storage room. Her hands. The warmth I couldn’t place. Her pushing my hand away when I started to ask.
“It stands at unfinished,” I say.
“That’ll have to do for now. But there are questions that will eventually need answers.”
“Sure.”
“All right. I’ll handle my end. You handle yours. Stay alive long enough for the rest of it to matter.”
The line goes dead.
I stand at the fence line with the phone in my hand. The family is still by the cage. Dawes has brought water in a bucket — the kind of improvisation you make when you don’t have time to find the right container — and the mother is drinking from scooped hands. The children are holding onto her.
I walk back and stand beside the father.
“Ravenclaw will take you. A team will meet us at a rendezvous point tomorrow morning. You’ll be escorted north. You’ll be safe there.”
His shoulders don’t drop. The relief hasn’t reached him yet. But the line of his jaw softens — the first human softening I’ve seen on him since I got to the cage.
“Tonight, we have food. Beds. Your children can sleep inside.”
The mother looks at him. He nods. She looks at me.
“Thank you.”
It’s the first time anyone has said those words to me in months. I don’t deserve them. But she says them anyway, and I don’t know what to do with them, so I just nod once and step back.
“Dawes. Get them to the bunkhouse.”
Dawes moves. The family goes with him, slowly, the children walking between their parents with the careful steps of kids who have learned not to attract attention.
I watch them until they reach the compound buildings, and then I turn and look at the empty cage.
The door is still hanging open. The note in my pocket.
I walk back to the house, and I tell Dawes to pull the pack together in the meeting hall. Then I stand at my father’s desk for ten minutes, collecting myself for what I’m about to do.