Chapter 16 #2
I can’t argue with her, because she’s right. It doesn’t make me feel any better, though.
“I need to call Brenna.”
“I know.”
I pull the burner from the nightstand drawer.
Brenna answers on the first ring. “You’re early.”
“We’ve got confirmation. The Forrester pack is running the pipeline.
Briar’s mapped the full corridor through their territory.
Months, maybe years of use, multiple passages.
And she witnessed a relocation this morning.
Conner Forrester personally drove a family with two children to the junction and supervised the transfer to a Syndicate vehicle. ”
Silence on the line. When Brenna speaks, her voice has gone clipped and cold, the intelligence operative, not the aunt. “How confident?”
“Briar has photographs. Scent evidence from the corridor matches the compound wolves. The enforcer’s involvement is confirmed firsthand. This isn’t a one-time thing. It’s systematic.”
“Shit.” A rare curse from Brenna. It lands with weight.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Brenna exhales. “All right. Listen to me. I’ve been working with Nadia on the bigger picture, and this actually ties in with what we’ve been working on.
Aurora’s had eyes on Syndicate activity in South Texas for weeks.
There’s a facility: a converted ranch property south of San Antonio, in the brush country.
Satellite imagery shows a compound with security infrastructure that doesn’t match its cover as a cattle operation.
Heat signatures suggest a significant population inside. ”
“A holding facility.”
“That’s what Nadia thinks. Jericho’s been analyzing the security patterns; he knows Syndicate protocols from the inside. He says it looks like a processing center. Wolves go in. They don’t come out.”
My wolf snarls from the dark place I’ve buried her. The sound vibrates in my throat, and I have to press my hand over my mouth to keep it from carrying. Briar glances at me. Doesn’t comment.
“The families,” I say. “Our families. Do you think that’s where they’ve ended up?”
“We can’t confirm. But the geography lines up. If the Forresters are feeding wolves into a southbound pipeline, and there’s a Syndicate facility south of San Antonio with an unexplained population… the connection is logical.”
“How far along is Aurora’s intelligence?”
“Nadia’s building a full picture. Jericho’s mapped the security from satellite.
They’re thorough, but they need ground-level confirmation before they can plan anything operational.
That’s where you come in.” A pause. “When the time comes, we won’t be going in light.
I’m not sending my niece into a Syndicate facility with two wolves and a prayer. ”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, when we have enough to act, I’ll mobilize. Merric’s team. Our fighters. Nadia and Jericho with Aurora backup. We’ll do this right.”
The relief of that—Brenna’s calm certainty, the promise of real force behind the mission—eases something in my chest that’s been wound tight since Briar showed me the photograph.
We’re not in this alone.
“There’s something else,” Brenna says. “Bern.”
Nathan Bern. The political wolf back in the Ozarks who’s been feeding intelligence to the Syndicate. We’ve known for some time that he’s compromised, but proving the extent of his network has been slow work.
“I want to test how far south his reach goes,” Brenna says. “Route a piece of information through a contact channel that Bern has access to. Something fabricated: a fake safe house location, say. If it gets passed to the Syndicate, we’ll know his network touches the southern operations.”
“And if it does?”
“Then Bern isn’t just a leak in the Ozarks. He’s connected to whatever’s running this pipeline. And that changes the scale of what we’re dealing with.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Stay where you are. Don’t pull out yet.”
The words land like a fist. “Brenna—”
“Listen to me. We have confirmation of the corridor, we have photographs of the enforcer, and we have a facility location. What we don’t have is the operational picture.
How many families have gone through. How often.
The contact network—who Conner calls to arrange the pickups, what numbers they use, what the chain looks like between Cedar Falls and that facility.
We need this information. Without it, we’re assaulting blind. ”
“So send someone else. I’ve done my part.”
“There is no one else. You’re inside the territory.
You’ve built a presence in that town. If you disappear now, the Forresters will know they’ve been watched, and they’ll burn every trail Briar’s mapped.
The corridor, the junction, the scent evidence—all of it goes cold the moment they realize they’re compromised. ”
She’s right, dammit.
“I also need you to route the Bern misinformation,” she continues.
“I want to test how far south his network reaches. I’ll set up a fabricated safe house location through a channel Bern has access to.
If it gets passed to the Syndicate, we’ll know his reach extends to the facility.
You route it when I give the word. Don’t tell anyone—not your source, not anyone local. This stays between Briar and us.”
My source. She means Conner.
“Understood.”
“How are things on the ground? With your access?”
She’s asking about Conner without asking about Conner.
“It’s over,” I say. “The access. The closeness. Whatever it was… It’s done.”
“That is… a pity,” she says cautiously.
“A pity?” I say sharply. “Are you serious?”
A pause. “I’m not asking you to go back to his bed, Willow. But I am asking you to stay in Cedar Falls. Keep your cover intact. Be seen in town. If Conner approaches you, don’t shut him out so hard that he gets suspicious. You don’t have to touch him. You just have to not disappear.”
“So I sit across from the man who loads children onto trucks and pretend nothing’s changed.”
“Yes.” No softness. No apology. “That’s exactly what I’m asking. Because the families in that facility need us to get this right, and getting it right means you hold your position for a few more days.”
A few more days. In a town that smells like him. Walking past the diner where we sat together. Staying in the motel where his hands were under my shirt twelve hours ago.
“Fine,” I eventually say, wishing I didn’t feel so sick about it. “But Brenna? When we go in for the families—when we hit that facility—I want to be the one who breaches.”
“We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”
“I’m not asking.”
Silence. Then: “Call me again as soon as you have more. We need to step this operation up now.”
“Of course.” I set the phone down.
Briar is watching me. She’s been listening to my side of the conversation. She reads gaps the way she reads terrain.
“She says there’s a facility,” I tell her. “South of San Antonio. Syndicate-adjacent. Looks like a processing center.”
“And the Forresters feed into it?”
“That’s the working theory.”
Briar starts cleaning the dust off her boots with a cloth. Precise, unhurried. When she speaks, her voice carries something I haven’t heard from her before. An edge. Personal.
“He’ll answer for every name that went through that corridor.”
“If Conner answers to anyone, it will be me,” I grind out.
“I wasn’t talking about him.” She turns away. From the set of her shoulders, I’m guessing she’s done talking.
I stare at the wall. The photograph is still on the nightstand where I set it down. The photo I don’t want to look at again, because he’s in it.
Last night, those hands were on my skin. This morning, they directed a child onto a truck headed south.
I don’t know how to hold both of those truths. I don’t think I’m supposed to. I think you pick one and let the other die, and the one I pick determines what kind of woman I am.
The pull is still there. Behind my breastbone. Steady, patient, aimed at the man in the photograph.
I want to rip it out.
I can’t.
But I can use it. The rage, the disgust, the knowledge of what he is—I can use all of it.
I can sit across from him at Dutch’s and smile and ask careful questions and learn every detail of the operation that put an eight-year-old boy on a truck headed south.
And underneath the smile, I’ll be outlining the system that’s going to bring his world down.
Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.
Tonight, I lie on this bed and let the rage settle into something cold and useful, and I don’t think about the swimming hole, or the way he said it’s not casual for me, or the sound his wolf made when I touched his face.
I don’t.