Chapter 33 #2
Bern. Beneath flickering fluorescents, the institutional lighting. A facility corridor. Bern walking through it with a man in a white coat. Looking through an observation window. On the other side of the window — tables. Equipment. A wolf strapped down.
Bern watching through the window. Not horrified. Not disturbed. Assessing. The face of a man evaluating a business investment.
And Mia. Mia was there. Behind another window, in another room, but close enough that her young mind absorbed his presence — his face, his energy, the man who walked through her prison like he owned it.
Because he did own it. Or the part of it that mattered.
The funding. The political cover. The network that kept the facility supplied, the councils uninformed, and the whole machine running.
While men like Garrett managed the calls and men like Conner stood at junctions, and none of them knew who was pulling the strings from above.
The images pour through the room. Every wolf in the building is getting them, I can see it in their faces, the stunned, sickened expressions of people seeing something they can’t unsee.
Can’t unfeel. Mia’s fear and desperation are everywhere.
The council chair has gone white. Delegates are on their feet. Someone in the fifth row is sobbing.
Bern staggers. His hands go to his head. He opens his mouth and blood runs from his nose, a thin line, bright red, tracking down his lip and chin.
“Make it stop!” His voice is different now. The smooth control is gone. “Make it— Make the child stop! I didn’t— Those images are—”
“True?” Brenna’s voice. Cold. “Because what I’m seeing looks very much like the southern pack leader personally inspecting a facility he claims to have no knowledge of.”
“That’s not— I was never—”
Mia screams again. The second wave is stronger. Bern drops to one knee. His ears are bleeding now, thin trails of red joining the blood from his nose. His eyes are wide, white-rimmed, the eyes of a man who’s being torn apart from the inside by a three-year-old who remembers his face.
More images. Scientists. Lab equipment. Wolves strapped down. Bern seeing it and walking by. All laid bare in the telepathic broadcast of a child who never learned to filter what she sees.
“I had to!” Bern screams. His hands are on the floor. His body is curling forward as if he’s being crushed by something invisible. “The Syndicate… they approached me. I didn’t have a choice!”
“You didn’t have a choice.” Martin’s voice. From the back of the room. Flat. Dead. “You didn’t have a choice?”
“They would have— My pack— They threatened—”
“My wife was on one of those tables.” Martin hasn’t moved from his position. His voice carries through the room without raising. “My children were separated from us on the first day. My daughter didn’t speak for six months after we got out. And you didn’t have a choice?”
Bern’s mouth opens. Closes. Blood is pooling on the floor beneath his face.
The broadcast has stopped. Mia is silent now, her face buried in Conner’s neck, her body limp with exhaustion.
But the damage is done. Every wolf in the room has seen what she showed them, and the images are burned into their skulls the way they’re burned into hers.
A delegate from the East Texas contingent stands. “I move for the immediate suspension of Elder Bern’s council position. Pending formal charges.”
“Seconded,” says another voice. And another. And another.
The council chair looks at Bern, who’s on his knees with blood on his face and his hands on the floor.
“Medical,” the chair says. “Get him medical attention. And get him out of this room.”
Two wolves come forward. They take Bern’s arms. He doesn’t resist. He hangs between them, his feet dragging.
As they move him toward the door, his eyes find Mia.
The child who destroyed him. The three-year-old whose memories contained the one thing all his political maneuvering couldn’t prepare for: the truth, delivered in a format no one could spin.
Mia doesn’t look at him. Her face stays in Conner’s neck. Her fist is tight around the rubber ball.
The room is in chaos. Delegates talking over each other. The council chair calling for order. Brenna standing at the front of the room, her expression controlled, managing the political fallout that’s unraveling in real time.
A voice rises above the noise. One of Bern’s allies — a heavy-set wolf from a western pack whose name I don’t know.
“This changes nothing about the Forrester situation. Bern’s involvement doesn’t exonerate the man who ran the corridor. He should be facing charges alongside—”
“He’s facing the consequences,” Brenna says. “He faced a Syndicate interrogation room. He provided intelligence that’s being used to dismantle their operations. He testified voluntarily. What would you have him do?”
“I’d have him answer for the wolves who—”
I stand up before I can think better of it. “Garrett Forrester has answered for his actions. And he will continue to. He is a man of character who will not step away from what he’s accountable for.”
He turns on me. “And what makes you a judge of his character?”
“Because he’s the father of my child.” The words are out of my mouth before I’ve decided to say them. They land in the room, and the room goes silent. I’m on my feet, and every wolf in the building is looking at me.
Garrett is looking at me.
I didn’t plan this. I didn’t rehearse it. The words came out of the same place that carried me through a drainage culvert and tore open a man’s throat. The place that made me sit on a porch step, letting a man touch my stomach while his thumb traced circles on the skin above his baby.
“The father of my child,” I say again, “has answered for what he did. With his body. With his testimony. With intelligence he gathered while being tortured. He walked into a Syndicate facility knowing what they would do to him. He did it to protect his pack and to dig out information that could save other wolves from what the corridor produced.”
My voice is steady. My hands are not. I press them flat against my thighs.
“My name is Briar. I’m a Frostbourne wolf.
I’m a Ravenclaw operative. I was the one who traced the corridor from the Forrester compound to the Syndicate facility.
I was the one who went into that compound and confronted Garrett Forrester with what his operation had done.
And I’m the one who’s carrying his child. ”
The room. The silence. Garrett’s face — one second of raw, unguarded shock. Not at the pregnancy. He knew that. At the public declaration. At me, standing in a room full of wolves who want his blood, claiming him.
Willow’s hand finds mine. Squeezes.
“The councils can do what they do,” I say.
“The formal process will continue. Charges will be filed, or they won’t.
But this man is not the same man who ran the corridor.
The man sitting in that chair walked into a Syndicate depot alone because he’d decided the corridor’s debt was his to pay. Those are not the same person.”
I sit down.
I’m breathless.
The room stays silent for three more seconds. Then the noise starts — voices, arguments, the political machinery absorbing what just happened and recalibrating.
Garrett is still looking at me. The shock has settled into something else. Something I recognize from the cabin, from the porch, from last night in the cot with his hand on my belly. The expression without a mask. The man without a frame.
He mouths something across the room. One word. I can’t hear it through the noise.
I don’t need to hear it. I can read it on his lips.
Mate.
I look away. My heart is hammering. Willow’s hand is still in mine. I’m squeezing hard enough to hurt her, and she’s letting me.
On Conner’s lap, Mia is asleep. The rubber ball clutched in her fist. The broadcast spent. Conner’s hand is on her head. His eyes are wet. He’s not wiping them.
Brenna catches my eye from the front of the room. The look she gives me is complicated — pride, exasperation, the expression of an alpha whose operative just detonated a political bomb in the middle of a formal hearing without clearing it first.
I give her a small shrug.
She almost smiles.
The hearing continues. The council votes.
Bern’s suspension is unanimous. Garrett’s case is deferred pending review of the intelligence he provided and the circumstances of his Syndicate captivity.
It’s not exoneration. It’s not forgiveness.
It’s the system doing what systems do — slowly, imperfectly, grinding toward something that might eventually resemble justice.
After, in the corridor outside the hearing room, Garrett finds me.
He doesn’t speak. He stands in front of me with Conner’s too-tight shirt and the scars on his wrists and the look on his face that I put there by standing up in a room full of wolves and calling him the father of my child.
He takes my hand. Puts it flat against his chest. His heartbeat under my palm. Fast. Hard.
“You said it,” he says.
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“You said it in front of every wolf in the southern territories.”
“I said what was true. That’s all.”
“Briar.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
I pull my hand back. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it for you. I did it because that wolf was trying to bury you under Bern’s mess, and you’ve already been buried enough.”
“You called me the father of your child.”
“You are the father of my child.”
“You said mate.”
“No, I didn’t. You said mate. I said father.”
His mouth twitches. The split lip is healed now, nothing but a faint line. The almost-smile does the thing it did last night, the crooked, real expression that makes him look like a person instead of an alpha.
“You’re going to say it eventually,” he says.
“Keep dreaming.”
“I will.” He reaches for my hand again. I let him take it. “I’ll keep dreaming until you say it.”
“Then you’ll be dreaming a long time.”
“I’ve got time.”
I look at him. This man. This impossible, infuriating, scarred-up, borrowed-clothes-wearing, stall-mucking, rubber-ball-keeping man who walked into a deathtrap and came out with a map and upended the southern territories with his testimony…
I think I might just love him.
“Come on,” I say. “We’re driving back to Ravenclaw. You can hold my hand in the car if you keep your mouth shut.”
“Deal.”
We walk out of the building. His hand in mine.
Willow and Conner behind us with Mia asleep on Conner’s shoulder.
Brenna and Merric talking low, already strategizing.
The delegates dispersing. Bern’s chair empty.
The hearing room settling into the quiet of a space where something enormous just happened, and the walls are still absorbing the impact.
The drive back is three hours. Garrett holds my hand the whole way. He keeps his mouth shut. Mostly.
“Briar.”
“You’re talking.”
“One thing.”
“What?”
“The baby. Is it—? Are you—?”
“Fine. We’re fine.”
His hand tightens on mine. I feel his pulse jump.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”
He doesn’t say anything else. His thumb traces a circle on my knuckle. Small. Steady. The gesture that started everything, translated from my belly to my hand.
I let him do it. I look out the window at the hills going past, and I let him trace his circles. I don’t pull away.
My wolf is quiet. Settled. Content in a way that isn’t the urgent, demanding pull from before. Deeper. Steadier. The contentment of an animal that has found what she was looking for and is holding it and knows it isn’t going anywhere.
I take in a long, steadying breath. Three hours to Ravenclaw.
My hand in his.