Chapter 16
Willow
Nearly two weeks. That’s how long it’s taken me to lose the plot entirely.
I’m sitting on my bed at the motel, staring at the wall, and the inventory keeps running: I’ve slept with Conner Forrester twice.
Joined him at a barbecue. Eaten his mother’s cornbread.
Let him take me to a place he hasn’t shown anyone since his sister died.
Sat beside him at Dutch’s and listened to him talk about water and cedar and land as if we were two ordinary people with nothing between us but coffee.
And last night—last night, I stood in this parking lot with my jeans unbuttoned and his mouth on my neck and almost let it happen again, right here, against his truck, while Briar was alone in the hills doing the work I should have been doing.
I’ve laughed more in two weeks than I have in two years. And I’ve accomplished less.
The mission isn’t stalled. Briar’s seen to that. She’s been in the hills every day, tracking scent, pushing further south, while I’ve been sitting in diners and parking lots, falling for a man whose pack may have destroyed my kind.
And last night’s interruption left more than frustration.
The phone call. The way his face changed—the man disappearing, the enforcer surfacing.
Dawes found something on the south boundary.
He said it like it was routine. But the urgency in his voice when he said how many told me it wasn’t routine.
Something happened on the Forrester boundary, and Conner left my arms to go deal with it.
I don’t know what. The not-knowing gnaws.
The door opens just after one. Later than Briar said she’d be, which isn’t like her.
She stands in the doorway, and something in her face stops me cold. Not anger. Something worse. The look of a woman who’s confirmed something she was hoping to be wrong about.
She comes in. Drops her pack. Doesn’t sit down. She’s been out all night and all morning, and whatever she found is sitting behind her eyes with a weight I can see from across the room.
“What happened?” I ask, getting to my feet.
“Sit down.”
“Just tell me.”
She reaches into her jacket and pulls out her phone. Flips to a photo. Holds it out.
The image is taken from a distance: grainy, zoomed, shot through tree branches.
But it’s clear enough. A dark truck parked on the edge of a gravel road.
And behind it, a sedan with the door open.
A woman climbing out of the backseat with a child in her arms. A man beside her.
Another child walking between them with an oversized backpack.
And standing at the dark truck, his body language unmistakable even in a blurry photo—broad shoulders, strong features, the posture of a man directing the operation—is Conner.
“This was this morning,” Briar says. “I’ve been watching the junction for three days.
It’s the chokepoint—the only place where the corridor connects to a road wide enough for a vehicle transfer.
I knew if anyone was going to move wolves through, it would happen there. ” She pauses. “This morning, it did.”
I stare at the photo. The woman and the child. The older boy. Conner’s shape at the edge of the frame.
“He drove them from a ravine south of the compound,” Briar continues.
“The family followed his truck in their own car. At the junction, a second truck arrived. Unmarked, blue, plates I couldn’t read from the ridge.
Two men. The family got out of their car and into the blue truck.
Left the sedan behind. The truck went south. ”
“And Conner?”
“He supervised the transfer. Start to finish.”
The phone is shaking in my hand. Not the phone—my hand.
“How old is the kid?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“Eight. Maybe nine.”
Eight.
I set the phone on the nightstand before I shatter it.
“There’s more,” Briar says. She pulls out her map and flattens it on the bed.
The lines I’ve been watching her build for nearly two weeks have changed.
The fragmentary traces from her first days of tracking have been connected, extended.
What I’m looking at now isn’t scattered evidence. It’s a route.
“The corridor runs here.” She traces the line.
“North to south, through the hills east of the compound. Follows the ridge for about three miles, drops into the creek bed, and continues south to the junction.” Her finger stops at the pullout in the photo.
“The scent evidence along the corridor is layered. Multiple passages. Ravenclaw signatures mixed with escort scents—local wolves, moving alongside them.”
“How many passages?”
“Impossible to say exactly. But the corridor is worn, Willow. This route has been used repeatedly over a long period. This isn’t a one-off.”
“So it’s definitely them. Him.”
Briar looks at me. Holds the look. “The scent markers along the corridor match the ones I’ve been picking up around the compound perimeter since we arrived. Same wolves.”
“And the occupants of the unmarked truck?”
“Dressed as civilians, but from the way they held themselves, I’d put my money on Syndicate.”
Oh my God.
There it is. All of it, at once.
The Forrester pack runs an organized corridor for moving wolves through their territory.
The route is deliberate, worn from repeated use, with escort scents that match the compound.
And Conner—the enforcer, the man who handles everything that happens on the ground—personally supervised a family transfer this morning.
Drove them to the junction. Called in the truck.
Watched a woman with a toddler and an eight-year-old boy climb into a vehicle with strangers and drive south. Likely to Syndicate holdings.
Last night, the thing that interrupted his hands on my body was the thing in this photograph.
I feel sick.
Cameron was seventeen when the Syndicate had him. Seventeen, and they cut him to ribbons.
That’s where the eight-year-old is going. That’s what’s waiting at the end of the road that Conner just put him on.
“Willow,” Briar says.
I can’t answer her. The rage is coming in like a tide.
Not hot, not explosive. Cold. The kind that starts in my gut and rises through my chest and fills my skull with a clarity so sharp that everything in the room stands out in brutal detail.
The pattern on the wallpaper. The dust on the lampshade.
The blurry shape of a man in a photograph who put an eight-year-old child on the road to hell.
I want to kill him.
The thought is clean and absolute. Not a figure of speech.
I want to drive to his house, drag him out of whatever chair he’s sitting in, and rip his throat out with my teeth.
I want to watch the comprehension dawn in those dark eyes—the same eyes that looked at me like I mattered—while he understands exactly who I am and exactly what he’s been doing to my people.
My wolf thrashes within me, desperate, howling for him with a need that makes me want to tear my own chest open.
No.
I slam her down. Hard, total, with every ounce of authority I have. She fights. Snarls. Strains to force me to shift. I hold her. Pin her flat. Bury her so deep she can’t surface.
She howls from somewhere far inside me. A sound of anguish that I refuse to feel.
You don’t get a say. Not now. Not about this.
Silence. Not agreement. Defeat. The animal crushed under the woman’s fury.
“Willow.” Briar’s voice. Steady. Waiting.
I turn to face her. Whatever she sees in my expression makes her go still.
“I want to hurt him,” I say. My voice is expressionless. “I want to kill him, and I want to burn that compound to the ground, and I want to find every wolf who ever stood at that junction and watched a family drive south, and I want to make them understand what’s waiting at the other end.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I’ve been sitting across from this man for days. Drinking coffee with him. Laughing at his jokes. Fucking him. And the whole time—the whole goddamn time—he’s been walking families with children to a truck that takes them to a place where they get cut open.”
“I know, Willow.”
“Cameron’s scars. Do you know what they look like? The ones on his arms—they’re surgical. Precise. They opened him up to get at the magic in his blood. He was seventeen. This kid is eight. Eight. And the other one is little more… than a baby.”
I swallow down bile. My hands are shaking. Not from grief. From the physical effort of not driving to Cedar Falls, not tearing Conner Forrester apart.
I pace the room.
“God, I’ve been such a fool.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” says Briar. “You’ve picked up tons of intel.”
I spin to face her. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve been killing yourself out there, while I’ve been mooning over a fucking purist.”
Briar shakes her head, then raises her hand.
“You gave us the map of the compound.” She ticks off a finger.
“You figured out how many wolves were in there, and what their hierarchy looks like.” She ticks another finger.
“You found out where the water points are and where the cattle move. That helped me plot out the primary routes.” Another finger.
“You gave us the delivery schedules, what their logistics look like, how many vehicles they use.” Another tick. “Shall I go on?”
I stare at her. Not because of what she’s just said, but because I don’t think I’ve ever heard Briar use so many words in one sitting.
“I still feel like a fraud,” I mutter.
“What you’ve been doing has been hard, Willow.” Briar locks eyes with me. “Using people is not in your nature. That’s a good thing. You’re doing it because you know lives are at stake. Doesn’t mean you don’t feel like shit though.”
I rub a hand over my face. “Why does it have to be so complicated?”
“Because you’re human and you have feelings,” she says. “You have a connection with this male, and now we’re making you use it. You’re conflicted. That’s natural. That’s normal. If you didn’t feel something, you’d be a sociopath.”