Chapter 26
Briar
The drop comes at training. I’m running Warrick and two other juniors through close-quarters drills when something jolts me from the inside out.
A sensation, low and rolling through my belly, intense enough that I miss a block.
Warrick’s forearm catches me across the shoulder and knocks me two steps back.
“Briar?”
“I’m fine. Reset.”
We go again. I put him on the mat with a sweep, and the move feels wrong, my body executing a pattern while my stomach clenches around something I can’t identify. The sensation builds. Deepens.
By the time I’ve shifted to breathing drills with the juniors, I’m pressing a fist against my lower belly without realizing I’m doing it. The warm, protective curl that Greta said was my wolf guarding the pregnancy has gone tight, alarmed, alert.
“Break,” I tell them. “Five minutes.”
I don’t take five minutes. I leave the training yard at a walk that breaks into a run as soon as I’m out of sight.
Greta is in the kitchen because of course she is. She sees me come through the door, and the expression on her face changes before I’ve said anything. Her hands stop moving. She sets down the skillet she was drying.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. My hand is on my stomach. “The… I can feel— Something’s wrong.”
“Sit down.”
“Greta—”
“Sit, honey.”
I sit. She comes around the counter and kneels in front of me. Her hand goes to my belly, a firm, knowing pressure. Her eyes close. I watch her face while she reads what’s happening to my body, and for the longest ten seconds of my life, I hold myself still, and I don’t breathe.
“The baby is fine,” she says at last.
My relief hits so fast it takes my breath.
I drop my head forward, and Greta’s other hand comes up to my shoulder and steadies me.
The realization lands underneath the relief.
I wanted it to be fine. Not just for my wolf’s sake, not just as a complication I’d been reluctantly accepting. I wanted it to be fine.
The fear that I’d lost my baby had cut through me a second ago with a grief I wasn’t prepared for. Now, the absence of that grief is letting me feel what it would have been like.
I’m attached. I didn’t realize how much.
“Briar.” Greta’s voice pulls me back. “Listen to me. The baby is fine, but the baby is not what you’re feeling.”
“What?”
“Think beyond your own body.”
I lift my head and look at her.
Her expression is patient but urgent. “Think,” she repeats.
I close my eyes.
I push past the belly, past my wolf’s protective instinct, past the relief that’s still settling. Past the surface of my own body to the thing underneath it. Him. The place where he exists in me like a second heartbeat.
He’s not moving. Contained. I can feel resolve in him, the flat, deliberate steadiness of a man who’s already made his decision and is executing it.
Underneath the resolve, something harder.
Grim. The quality of a person who has consciously chosen a path that will cost them and is walking it anyway.
Then a flare. Sharp. The bright signal of pain that has to punch through his effort to shield me from it. He’s trying to hide it. Some of it gets through anyway.
“He’s in trouble,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“He— Oh God. Oh God, Greta, what do I do?”
My breath is coming in short pulls I can’t seem to regulate. I press both hands flat on my knees and wait for them to slow. Panic is unfamiliar to me.
“I don’t know. That’s what you need to find out. But you can’t find out alone, and you can’t help him alone. Your wolf knows this.” Greta’s hand tightens on my shoulder. “Go to the alphas. Now.”
I stand up. My legs are unsteady. Something pulls against my ribs, and I can feel the details of what’s happening to him more clearly by the second — a vehicle, the rhythm of movement, the sense of him being taken somewhere.
“Greta—”
“Briar! Go!”
I go.
Merric and Brenna are out at the dam when I find them. Brenna leaning against Merric’s shoulder. Together, thank God. Though they’ve spent most of their time together since the hearings began.
Brenna looks up as I arrive and registers my face. She touches Merric’s arm. He swivels to look at me.
“What happened?”
“I need to talk to you. Both of you. Inside.”
They don’t ask questions. We go back to the lodge.
The kitchen is occupied when we come through. Conner at the table with his hands around a coffee cup. Willow beside him. They look up when we come in, read the three of us, and Conner sets his mug down slowly.
“What’s going on?” Willow asks.
Brenna pulls out a chair. Sits. Merric stays standing by the door. They’re both looking at me, and so are Conner and Willow, and there’s no version of this that doesn’t require me to start revealing the truth.
“Garrett’s in trouble,” I say. “Something’s happening to him. I think he’s been taken. I think he gave himself up to someone.”
Conner goes very still.
“When?” Brenna says.
“In the last hour.”
Merric’s hand curls into a fist and then loosens. “The Syndicate.”
“I don’t know. I can only feel him. I can’t see what’s around him.”
“You can feel him?” Merric frowns. Brenna puts a hand to his shoulder.
“Why do you think it’s the Syndicate?” she asks.
“Who else would take him? He refused them. He sent us a family.”
Conner speaks without looking up from the table. His voice is low and controlled, and I can hear the undertone underneath it — the brother. The one who wanted to be done with him and isn’t.
He’s nodding as he looks at me. “The family was a test. Garrett pushed back at them.” He rubs his eyes. “He knows they’re going to retaliate, so he’s drawing them away from the pack. He would do that.”
Brenna looks from him to me. “You can feel this?”
“Yes. We… We have a mate bond.”
There. It’s out.
“Since when?” asks Brenna, though I’m sure she suspects. She’s just confirming.
“Since I went after him. Weeks ago.”
Silence. Merric’s face doesn’t change. Brenna’s doesn’t either. I’d expected something — surprise, disappointment, the expression she wears when someone in her pack has withheld significant information — but what I get instead is the alpha processing the operational implications.
“And you’re certain he’s been taken.”
“Yes.”
“How certain?”
“I can feel physical sensation from him. He’s restrained. He’s been moved into some kind of vehicle. And there was a moment of pain, just now, a reaction to something. I’m certain.”
Brenna looks at Merric. “Call his second. Dawes.”
Merric reaches for the phone on the wall. He dials from the ledger — the number we got from the rendezvous yesterday. It rings three times before Dawes picks up.
Merric puts it on speaker. “Dawes. This is Merric Rourke at Ravenclaw.”
“Rourke.” Dawes’s voice is the voice of a man who’s been waiting for this call. “What can I do for you?”
“We have reason to believe Garrett Forrester has been taken by the Syndicate. Can you confirm?”
A pause. Long enough that my wolf lunges against my ribs in anxiety.
“He left the compound at eleven-thirty this morning,” Dawes says. “He was meeting with the Syndicate. Didn’t give a location, but the meet was at two o’clock. He went alone. He surrendered himself on the condition that they leave the compound untouched.”
“Surrendered.” Brenna.
“Voluntarily. We’ve had no contact since his departure. His truck is presumed abandoned at the depot.”
“What did he tell you about their intentions?”
“Nothing specific. He expected to be questioned. He didn’t expect to come back. He asked me to contact you if he didn’t.”
“Why me?”
Dawes is quiet for a second. Then: “He said you’d understand what to do with the information.”
The three of us look at Brenna. She looks at the phone.
“Information?”
“He plans to find out as much as he can about their operation while… while he’s still alive in there.”
God. Oh God!
I’m fighting to keep my breath steady, the wolf’s anxious panting influencing my own.
Get it together. This is no time to fall apart.
“Thank you, Dawes. I’ll be in touch.” Brenna hangs up.
The kitchen is quiet. Willow’s hand has found Conner’s arm across the table. Conner’s face is gray.
Brenna looks at me. “You want us to go get him.”
“I…” I can’t answer immediately because the answer is…
Complicated.
Why would I want him back? The corridor. The boxes. The rabbit. The wolves whose names we still don’t know. The child Mia was when the facility he fed put her on a table and gave her a number.
Why should I risk Ravenclaw, risk my pack members, risk the child I’m carrying, to pull him out of a hole he dug himself into by doing exactly what he built the hole for?
Why care if he dies?
My wolf’s answer comes through so fast it bypasses my mind entirely: mine, mine, mine, the same thing she’s been saying since the second she caught wind of him.
But underneath the wolf, something else.
I think about the hearing. The simple sentence — I have no defense — delivered to a room full of his peers with no performance left in him.
I think about his hand on his sister’s stone, the grief in his body.
Dawes’s at the rendezvous this morning: he asked me to contact you if he didn’t come back.
A man who’d expected to die for his pack and made peace with it.
And the other moments. His hand on my belly. Him catching my palm against his chest and holding it there while his heartbeat slowed.
He became something else. While I was watching. And somewhere between the clearing and now, the woman inside the wolf started choosing him too, and never quite noticed it happening.
I look at Brenna.
“Yes,” I say. “I want us to go get him.”
Brenna studies me. Then she nods once. “Merric. Call Nadia.”