Chapter 24
Briar
Midnight. The truck is loaded. Merric is driving with Conner in the passenger seat with the map open on his lap, running routes.
Sienna and Willow are in the back with me, Sienna in her patrol leathers, Willow with a small canvas bag that probably has more useful items in it than everyone else’s gear combined.
We head south.
The night is clear. The Ozarks fall away behind us, and we pick up the highway through eastern Oklahoma, heading toward the coordinates Brenna passed on from Garrett’s text.
A rest area off a farm road, two hours north of the Forrester compound.
Chosen because it’s neutral ground, neither territory claims it, neither pack has any reason to watch it.
I drive the second leg. Merric sleeps against the window. Conner takes the third watch, and I catch an hour in the back, curled against the door with Willow silent beside me.
My wolf won’t let me sleep deeply. Every few minutes, she surfaces, draws my attention, and shows me something that filters into my dreams. Garrett, awake, pacing in a dim room.
Garrett sitting at a kitchen table with his head in his hands.
Garrett at a window, his palm flat on the glass.
My wolf wants me focused on him, wants me to feel that he’s still there, still breathing, still planning whatever he’s planning.
By the time dawn is breaking, I’m behind the wheel again, and Willow is pointing at a turnoff.
“There. Left.”
I take the left. A gravel road through sparse pine. A rest area with three picnic tables, a concrete pad, and a single streetlight that’s probably been flickering since the seventies. Empty, except for one vehicle: an old pickup parked at the far end.
I kill the engine fifty yards back. We wait.
A man gets out of the pickup. Tall, built, fifty or so. Forrester wolf. I can scent him from here, the undertone that every wolf from a pack carries. He walks around to the truck bed and lowers the tailgate. I see movement in the bed — blankets, faces.
The family.
“Let’s go,” Merric says quietly.
We get out. Walk toward the pickup, spread in a loose formation that isn’t quite a threat display but isn’t quite not, either. The Forrester wolf watches us approach. His hands are visible, away from his body. He’s on his own. No backup.
Dawes.
I recognize him.
He recognizes me, too. His mouth quirks. He knows something. Maybe not everything, but he’s nobody’s fool. None of them is. I’m keeping a secret that everyone seems to know about, but nobody’s acknowledging.
“Ravenclaw,” he says.
“Forrester,” Merric returns.
“The family’s in the bed. Two adults, two kids. Fed them as well as they’d eat, let them sleep. The kids are exhausted. The father’s got a dislocated shoulder that my wife set last night — she knows enough to do that much.”
Willow walks past the men and to the truck bed.
She climbs up, quiet, and kneels at the tailgate.
I hear her voice, low, gentle, the voice she uses with Mia.
I don’t hear what she says. But the shapes in the blankets shift, and after a moment, a boy’s head appears above the tailgate.
He stares at Willow. She smiles and says something else.
Dawes watches them. Then looks back at Merric, and at me.
“He wanted me to tell you something,” he says.
“Who?” Merric asks.
“Garrett. For her.” Dawes looks at me.
Merric’s eyebrows lift. Minutely. He says nothing.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“He said: ‘Tell her whatever’s wrong with her, she should know I’d be there if I could.’” Dawes delivers it like a man reading text off a screen — no interpretation, no embellishment. “He said you’d know what it meant.”
My wolf freezes. The warmth in my belly spikes — a sharp, protective flare.
He knows. He doesn’t know specifically, but he knows enough.
Of course he does. He’s practically in my head.
I don’t give Dawes the satisfaction of a reaction. “Thank you.”
“He also said to tell you to stay out of whatever comes next.”
“Noted.”
“And he said—” Dawes pauses. For the first time, his professional neutrality slips. “He said that whatever happens, the compound stays standing. Jessie’s in charge. He’s gone somewhere else.”
Merric frowns. “Gone where?”
“He didn’t say. I don’t think he wanted me to know.”
The transfer happens quickly. Willow coaxes the family out of Dawes’s truck bed.
We move them into ours the same way, blankets in the bed, Willow climbing in with them.
Sienna hands the children up one at a time.
The mother is shaking. The father can barely use his left arm.
The kids don’t speak. They just move where they’re directed.
Dawes stays until they’re all in the truck. Then he closes his tailgate, walks around to the driver’s side, and stops. He looks at me across the hood.
“I never liked you,” he says. “Watching you on those ridgelines. Thought you were trouble.”
“I was.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s not going to survive it without help. You should know that.”
“What does he need?”
“He won’t say. He made Jessie promise not to go after him.
Told us to protect the compound. But the man who drove up to our gate yesterday evening is not the same man who drove out the morning before, and I’ve known him since he was fifteen.
He’s made peace with something that doesn’t look like peace from the outside. ”
My hand is on the side of the truck. I feel the cold metal under my palm.
“When?” I ask.
“Soon. Days. He’s waiting for the family to be clear. Then he moves.”
“Moves where?”
“I told you. I don’t know. He’s going to make them find him somewhere that isn’t his compound. Whatever that means.”
Dawes gets in his truck, starts it, and rolls his window down before pulling away.
“Ravenclaw.” He nods at Merric. Then to me: “Briar. Whatever you’re doing — figure it out fast.”
He pulls out.
We stand in the empty rest area watching his taillights disappear.
Merric turns to me. “You want to tell me what that was about?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He jerks his head toward the truck. “Let’s get them home.”
The drive back is quiet. The children fall asleep against their mother.
The father sits with his back against the cab wall, not speaking, watching the road disappear behind them.
Willow is beside them in the bed, one hand on the tailgate rail, checking for pursuit, checking for magical residue, reading whatever threads run between the family members and the road behind us.
I drive. My hands are tight on the wheel.
He knows something is wrong with me.
He sensed it in the storage room, and now he’s sent a message telling me he’d be there if he could. He’s planning something that requires him to be somewhere other than home, somewhere the Syndicate can find him, and he’s going without backup.
My wolf is running circles in my chest. Frantic. The restless circling of an animal who can feel something wrong and can’t reach it.
He’s going in alone. He doesn’t stand a chance.
I drive. I don’t cry. Briar doesn’t cry.
But somewhere between the Oklahoma border and the Ozark foothills, my wolf stops circling and does something I’ve never felt from her. She curls. Around the warmth in my belly. Around whatever is growing there. And she holds it tight, the way a mother holds a child during a storm.
She’s guarding it. From what’s coming. From what’s already happening.
She knows. Before I’ve let myself know. She knows he’s not coming back unless I go get him.
The sun climbs. The Ozarks rise in front of us. I drive, and the family sleeps in the back, and my wolf holds what’s inside me like the last warm thing left in the world.