Chapter 28
Garrett
The van stops after what I estimate is four hours.
I’ve been counting. Not miles; I can’t see the road. Time. Counting the way wolves count when counting is the only control left. Four hours at highway speed puts me roughly two hundred and fifty miles from the depot. South or southeast, based on the turns.
The doors open. I flinch against the light. Not daylight. Banks of fluorescent tubes in a high ceiling, buzzing at a frequency that my dampened wolf can barely register. The air is dry. Chemical. Sealed ventilation. No open windows.
“Out.”
Two of the men pull me by the arms. My legs buckle when my feet hit concrete — four hours restrained with the dampening runes has left my muscles dead from the knee down. I go to one knee. A hand catches my collar and hauls me upright.
“Walk.”
I walk, pins and needles climbing from my ankles into my calves with every step.
A loading bay — concrete floor, steel walls, mounting points for machinery that’s been stripped out.
Drainage channels cut into the floor. Faded safety markings on the walls that nobody’s painted over.
Whatever this building was, it was industrial.
The Syndicate hollowed it out and filled it with something else.
We go through a corridor next. The ceiling drops.
The walls close in. The fluorescent buzz gets dimmer, the light yellower, cheaper.
There are doors on both sides — heavy steel, observation slots at eye level.
One of them is open. A guard inside is eating a sandwich.
He looks up as I pass, chewing, and goes back to his food.
Another corridor. The man on my left has a grip on my bicep that’s going to leave bruises. The one on my right is half a step ahead, leading. Neither of them speaks. Their boots echo. Mine drag.
“In here.”
It’s a room with concrete walls. A drain in the floor — dark, dry, waiting. There’s a metal chair bolted to the slab, restraint points welded to the arms and legs. A second chair is opposite it, unbolted. A table is set between them. Nothing on it.
The light overhead flickers. On off on off on. The same dying-tube rhythm I felt through the bond when Briar pushed Mia’s nightmares at me. I know that rhythm. I know what rooms with that rhythm look like from the inside of a three-year-old’s head.
I’m standing in one.
“Sit down.”
My body doesn’t want to sit in that chair. I know what that chair leads to. My wolf, even muffled behind the runes, is throwing himself against the suppression with a fury that makes my jaw ache.
The men don’t wait for my body to cooperate. Hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. My ass hits cold metal. Straps go around my wrists — click, click — ankles — click, click — a band across my chest that pins me to the backrest.
Same positioning Briar used in the cabin. The thought arrives out of nowhere.
The men go. The door closes. The lock engages — heavy, mechanical, a sound that has finality built into it.
I test the cuffs out of habit. The wrist angle is different from Briar’s — these aren’t designed to prevent shifting, because the runes are already handling that. These are designed to prevent a man from standing up.
The room is cold. Not freezing — a temperature that’s chosen for its effect on the body over hours.
Cool enough to raise gooseflesh. Cool enough that by midnight, the cold will be in my joints, and my muscles will be stiff, and my ability to maintain composure will have been chipped away by my body’s constant low-level demand for warmth.
I know this technique. I’ve used it. Not in rooms like this. In fields, in the back of the meeting hall. Confinement. Temperature. Patience. The alpha’s toolkit for wolves who crossed lines.
The chair I’m sitting in is the other side of my own method. Mine has never been this extreme. I’ve never needed a drain in the floor.
Briar is far away. A warmth in the back of my skull that I have to reach for now instead of feeling automatically.
The distance and the runes together have thinned her to almost nothing.
She’s agitated. Her wolf is circling. I can feel the motion of it, the anxious pacing of a bonded female whose mate is in distress.
I push my end down. Hard. I don’t want to send her what this room feels like.
The fluorescent tube flickers. The drain waits.
Time passes.
The cold works. It starts in my fingers and toes and moves inward by degrees.
Each hour peeling away another layer of resistance that I didn’t know I was using until it’s gone.
My shoulders tighten. The shivering starts, small at first, then deeper, the muscles in my back contracting in spasms I can’t control.
Footsteps in the corridor. I count them — two sets. One I recognize. One I don’t.
The lock disengages.
The regional operative enters first. Same flat expression he had at the grain silos. Behind him, a second man, and my wolf — even suppressed, even behind the rune-wall — goes on full alert.
Wrong. Everything about the second man is wrong. The scent, the energy, the way the air in the room shifts when he walks through the door. Not wolf. Something else. Something that makes the animal flatten against the floor of my consciousness the way a dog flattens when thunder rolls.
Dragon.
He’s tall. Lean. Dark ash-blond hair tied back from a face that’s all angles. He carries a chair under one arm the way you’d carry a newspaper, one-handed, no effort, the chair’s weight meaning nothing to him. He sets it across from me and sits. Crosses one ankle over his knee.
His eyes are ice-blue. They find mine and hold them, and his attention is like nothing I’ve felt from another person. Not assessment. Not threat. He’s assessing me the way you’d assess equipment before deciding whether to repair it or scrap it.
“Mr. Forrester.” His voice has an accent I can’t place — old, European maybe. “My name is Alastair Creed. I’m the reason you’re still breathing.”
The regional operative takes a position by the door. Creed doesn’t look at him. Creed is looking at me.
“Your deal with my associate was straightforward. You surrender. Your compound stays intact. You cooperate with questioning.” He folds his hands. “Clear enough?”
“Clear.”
“Good. Then let me be equally clear about what happens now.” He leans back. “You have information I want. Not the corridor logistics. We built the corridor, Mr. Forrester. I don’t need you to explain our own supply chain.”
“Then what?”
“Everything adjacent. The wolves in your region who knew what you were doing and kept quiet. The packs who cooperated informally. The alphas who benefited from the Syndicate’s presence without appearing on any ledger.
” He uncrosses his legs. “The political structure that allowed you to operate for a decade without a single formal challenge. That’s what I want. Not your corridor. Your map.”
“My map.”
“Of complicity. Which is considerably more useful than a list of names.”
“Why?”
“Because corridors are replaceable. The one you shut down was one of six in the southern region alone. What isn’t replaceable is the network of cooperation that sustained it.
The wolves who looked away. The packs who adjusted their patrol routes to leave gaps.
The alphas who received payments and asked no questions.
” He pauses. “New corridors need the same kind of cooperation. The fastest way to build that is to identify the wolves who cooperated before. You’re not giving me intelligence on the past. You’re giving me a blueprint for the future. ”
I watch his face while he talks. There’s nothing in it. No anger, no satisfaction, no performance. Just the clean, clinical delivery of a man explaining a business proposition. He could be discussing feed contracts or fence repairs. The calmness of his tone is the most unsettling thing about him.
“No.”
His expression doesn’t shift. The ice-blue eyes hold mine.
“That was quick. I expected at least a pause.”
“I came here to take whatever you throw at me. I didn’t come here to help you build another corridor.”
“You came here to protect your compound. Which I can unprotect with a phone call.”
“Then make the call.”
A flicker. Something behind the flat surface. Amusement, maybe, or the ghost of it. “You mean that.”
“Yes.”
I’m here to protect my pack. But not at the cost of setting up another wolf pipeline.
“Interesting.” He uncrosses his legs. Leans forward. The movement is small. The change in the room is not. The air gets heavier. The temperature drops by a degree that has nothing to do with the ventilation. The fluorescent tube stutters and dims for a second before recovering.
The man sitting across from me has stopped pretending to be human-sized, and whatever he actually is has filled the room and pressed me back against the chair without touching me.
“I prefer working with living assets,” he says. “Dead wolves don’t cooperate. Destroyed compounds don’t produce useful intelligence. But those preferences have limits, Mr. Forrester. And you are testing mine.”
He reaches into his jacket and removes something. Sets it on the table.
A photograph. A building I don’t recognize. Low, industrial, surrounded by fencing. I can only imagine it’s a facility like the one Willow and Conner destroyed.
“Sixteen operational research facilities,” Creed says, confirming it.
“Four continents. The southern facility your people dismantled was one node. A significant node. Its loss was inconvenient. But replaceable.” He taps the photograph with one finger.
“Everything is replaceable. Facilities. Corridors.” His eyes find mine. “Alphas.”
“I can’t give you what I don’t have.”
“You have more than you think. Years running a supply line leaves impressions the operator doesn’t realize he’s collected.
Names mentioned in passing. Routes suggested by contacts.
The patterns you observed without recording.
All of it is in your head.” He stands. Picks up his chair one-handed.
Moves it to the wall. “And my people are very skilled at finding things in heads.”
He walks to the door. Stops. His hand on the frame.
“We begin tomorrow. Tonight, you’ll sit in this room and consider your position.
The dampening runes will keep your wolf contained.
The temperature will drop another few degrees at midnight.
” He glances back at me. “By morning, you’ll be cold and stiff, and your resistance will be exactly where I want it. ”
The door closes. The lock engages.
The room is quiet. The fluorescent tube flickers. The cold is already deeper than it was an hour ago, or my body has lost enough warmth that the difference no longer matters.
I hope she can’t feel it. But at some point, she will. At some point, I won’t have the strength to stifle my reaction to whatever they do to me. And she’ll be forced to ride it out.
The cold keeps working. The tube keeps flickering. The drain watches me with its dark mouth.
I close my eyes, and I think about what Creed said. Sixteen facilities. Four continents. The scope of what I fed. I thought I was feeding a regional operation. A single facility. A system that did whatever it did and stayed contained.
There’s nothing contained about it. The corridor I managed was one tributary feeding a river that spans the world. And the man who just walked out of this room wants me to help him keep the river flowing.
I won’t. That’s the one certainty I have left in this room. Whatever they do tomorrow, I won’t give him the map. I won’t draw the blueprint. I won’t help them rebuild what I helped destroy.
My breath fogs under the flickering light. Hours pass.
Sometime deep in the night, when my teeth are chattering, and my hands have gone numb in the cuffs, and the shivering has become a constant, full-body tremor, I feel her.
Warm. Sudden. Not her anxiety. Something else.
She’s pushing toward me. Deliberately, the way she pushed Mia’s nightmares weeks ago.
But this isn’t fury. This isn’t vengeance.
This is just… her. The walls she keeps between us have dropped, and what pours through is everything she usually holds back.
Not words. Not images. Presence. Her… fierce, small, unguarded, saying something I can’t translate, but my body understands.
I’m here.
I hold it. My hands are numb, and my body is shaking, and the room is a concrete box with a drain in the floor and a dead fluorescent tube that’s finally given up and gone dark.
But she’s there, and the warmth of her is real.
I hold it the way I’ve held everything she’s given me: against my will, against my judgment, because the wolf decided and the man got dragged along, and the man stopped fighting somewhere between the cabin and now.
I hold it until morning. Until the lock disengages. Footsteps. More than two sets this time.
An observation slot opens in the door. A face appears, impassive.
“Mr. Creed will see you now.”
The door opens. Three men enter with equipment I don’t recognize, and the clinical efficiency of people who’ve done this before and will do it again, and see nothing unusual about it.
I hold her warmth. I hold it as the first hands reach for me, and I don’t let go.