Chapter 32
Briar
He’s been at Ravenclaw for three days when I find him in the barn.
I’m not looking for him. I’m getting a halter for one of the mares that slipped her fence, and he’s in the back stall with a pitchfork, mucking out bedding like he’s been doing it his whole life.
Which he has. Forrester wolves are ranch wolves.
Their compound runs cattle and horses, and the alpha grew up shoveling shit before he grew up making decisions that destroyed people’s lives.
He’s shirtless. The bruising across his ribs has gone from purple to pale yellow-green, the healing accelerating the way Sable predicted.
The cuts on his chest are closed, pink lines that’ll fade to nothing within a week.
The scars on his forearms — mine, from the cabin — are silver and permanent.
Five lines on each arm that he hasn’t tried to hide since he arrived.
He hasn’t tried to hide anything since he arrived.
That’s the part I’m having trouble with. The Garrett Forrester in my head — the one I hunted down — that man was a wall. Alpha mask. Controlled. Every gesture calculated, every word filtered through whatever frame he was building around the truth.
This man is mucking a stall. He’s been doing it every morning since Sable cleared him for physical work yesterday.
Nobody asked him to. He got up before dawn, found the barn, found the tools, and started cleaning stalls like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Dane told me about it at breakfast, one eyebrow raised, the closest Dane gets to commentary.
“Briar.” He’s seen me. He leans the pitchfork against the wall and wipes his forehead with his arm. The movement pulls the muscle across his ribs, and I watch it happen, and my wolf makes a sound I pretend not to hear. Even broken, he’s beautiful.
“I need the halter on the third hook,” I say.
“This one?” He reaches for it. His body extends — the stretch, the reach, the way the healing bruises shift across his torso — and I look at the halter and not at his body because I am a disciplined woman and a disciplined woman does not stare at the abdominal muscles of a man she’s supposed to hate.
“That one.”
He brings it to me. Our fingers brush on the leather. The contact is brief, and my wolf throws herself toward it like it’s water in a desert. I take the halter and step back.
“The gray mare got out again,” I say. “South fence.”
“I can fix that fence.”
“You’re not fixing our fences, Garrett.”
“Why not? I know fences. I’ve been fixing fences since I was twelve.”
“Because you’re a guest here. Guests don’t fix fences.”
“Am I a guest?” He asks it without edge.
Genuine question. The brown eyes — both open now, the swelling gone — hold mine with that expression I keep seeing.
The one without performance. “Because I’m not sure what I am here.
Nobody’s told me, and I haven’t wanted to ask.
The wolves in this compound look at me the way you’d look at a rattlesnake in your kitchen.
Nobody quite sure whether to kill it or leave it alone. ”
“Give it time.”
“How much time?”
“However much it takes.”
He nods. Accepts it. Picks up the pitchfork and goes back to work.
I should leave. I’ve got the halter. The mare is waiting. There’s no reason to stand in this barn watching a man shovel dirty straw.
“Martin won’t look at me,” he says, not looking up. Working the fork through the bedding with the steady rhythm of someone who finds physical work easier than conversation. “The man with the— The lean one. His wife and children were in the facility.”
“I know who Martin is.”
“He stands at the far end of the yard when I come through. Every morning. Same spot. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t approach. Just watches.”
“What do you expect him to do?”
“Nothing. I expect nothing from anyone here. But I see him, and he sees me, and neither of us says anything. And I think that might be worse for both of us than getting everything off his chest.”
I lean against the stall door. The halter is in my hands. The mare can wait.
“What would you say to him?”
He stops working and rests his arms on the pitchfork handle. Thinks about it.
“I’d say I don’t know how many wolves went through my corridor.
I kept numbers, not names. Thirty-seven transfers in the ledger, but some of those were families, so the actual count is higher.
I’d say that I never watched one of those trucks leave the junction, so I never saw the faces of his wife and children.
And that’s not a defense, it’s the crime. ”
His voice is steady. The same tone from the hearing. Accountable.
“I’d say I’m sorry. And I’d mean it. It wouldn’t be enough, but I’d say it anyway.”
“You should tell him that.”
“Would he hear it?”
“I don’t know. But you should say it whether he hears it or not.”
He looks at me. The barn is dim aside from a soft, golden morning light. His face in this light is the face from the forest: unguarded, stripped, the man underneath the alpha. The one who traced circles on my stomach while I pretended to sleep.
“You’re different here,” I say. I don’t mean to say it.
“Different how?”
“Smaller. Not… not physically. You’re…” I search for it. “You’re not taking up all the space in the room. You used to fill a room when you walked into it. The alpha thing. The presence. You’d walk into a space, and every wolf in it would adjust.”
“I’m not the alpha here.”
“No.”
“Is that what’s different?”
“I don’t know what’s different.” I push off the stall door. “I need to catch the mare.”
“Briar.”
I stop.
“The ball,” he says. “The rubber ball Mia gave me. I’ve been keeping it on the nightstand in the cabin. Is that—?” He pauses. “Is that all right? I don’t want to take something from her that she needs.”
“She gave it to you. She doesn’t give things to people. If she gave it to you, she meant it.”
“Why would she give it to me?”
“Because Mia sees things the rest of us don’t.”
He absorbs this. The pitchfork rests against his hip. His hands are dirty from the straw, and there’s a smudge on his jaw. He looks nothing like the man I locked in that cabin, and everything like someone I am in deep, relentless trouble over.
I turn and walk out of the barn. The halter in my hand. My wolf humming.
I catch the mare. She’s grazing in the south pasture, unconcerned about her escape, and I slip the halter on and lead her back to where she belongs.
The compound is waking up around me. Greta in the kitchen.
Merric on the porch with coffee. The rescued family’s children are playing near the bunkhouse with a dog who’s adopted them.
Willow finds me at the fence.
“You were in the barn,” she says.
“Getting a halter.”
“For thirty minutes.”
“The mare was out.”
“The mare’s been out since dawn. You didn’t go looking for her until Garrett was in the barn.”
“Willow.”
“I’m just observing.”
“Observe quieter.”
She smiles. It’s small and careful, and it’s the closest Willow gets to teasing. “The thread between you is different today.”
“I don’t want to hear about threads.”
“Thicker. More complex. There are… layers to it that weren’t there before.” She pauses. “Briar. He’s going to figure it out on his own if you don’t tell him.”
“Figure what out?”
“Don’t.” Gently. “Don’t do that. Not with me.”
I tie the mare to the fence. My hands are busy with the knot, and my eyes are on the rope. My voice is flat when I say, “His wolf already knows. I can feel it. The way he looks at me has changed. He’s circling it.”
“Then tell him before he lands it himself. Let it come from you.”
“I’m not ready.”
“When will you be?”
“I don’t know. When the hearing is done. When the Syndicate situation is resolved. When I’ve figured out what he is to me and whether—”
“Whether you love him.”
The rope is tied. The mare stamps. The morning is warm, and the hills are green. And Willow is standing beside me, waiting for an answer I don’t have.
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“You broke into a Syndicate facility to pull him out.”
“That’s not love. That’s operational.”
“You’re carrying his child.”
“That’s not love either. That’s biology.”
“You stood in a barn for thirty minutes watching him shovel horse shit, Briar. That’s not biology. That’s not operational. That’s a woman who can’t stay away from a man she’s trying not to want.”
My jaw tightens. Willow watches it tighten and doesn’t flinch, because Willow has never flinched from me.
Not when we were stuck together in a motel room for two weeks.
Not when I made her wear a slutty dress to gather intel.
Not any time. That’s why she’s the only person in this compound who gets to say things like this to my face.
“You’re impossible, you know that?” she huffs when the silence drags on too long. “We’ve all been watching you avoid him since he got here, and it’s as clear as day that you want this man. Just talk to him, Briar.”
I exhale slowly. “The hearing is in four days,” I say. “Bern will be there. The full southern council. Garrett is testifying again. After that… After that, I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She touches my arm. “But Briar… don’t wait too long. He’s not a patient man. And from what I can read in his thread, he’s about three days from walking up to you and saying it himself.”
“Saying what?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Briar! You know what.”
She walks away. I stand at the fence with the mare in the morning sun. And I know that Willow is right and that three days is probably generous.
I turn my attention to keeping busy.
The afternoon is patrol time. I run the south ridge because the south ridge is the one that doesn’t take me past the barn. I run it twice because the first time, my wolf tries to detour east toward the cabin where Garrett is resting. I have to physically haul her back on course.
The second pass, I come off the ridge at sunset, and he’s on the porch of his cabin.