Chapter 18
Willow
The dream starts the way it always starts: the porch beneath me, the morning cold on my face.
The valley is white below, the ridges breaking through.
I can hear the creek running high from last night’s rain.
I can smell the wet earth and the wood smoke and the deep sweetness of fall decay that means home.
Then it shifts.
The fog thickens. Turns wrong. Not the soft white of an Ozark morning but something darker, oily, pressing against my skin with an intensity that doesn’t belong in a dream.
The hills disappear. The porch disappears.
The creek goes silent. I’m standing in a space with no walls and no floor, and all my senses are wide open—wider than I’ve ever felt them, every bond I’ve ever held streaming out from my chest like filaments of light, reaching south, reaching further than they’ve ever reached.
They find something.
Ravenclaw bonds. Unmistakable. The resonance of my bloodline, the wolves I grew up beside, the people I held together for two years.
The Donovans: Martin and Leah and their teenage son, whose signature I’d know anywhere because I taught him how to use his magic when the raids came.
The Hartwells: Joanna and Ben and their daughter, the girl who used to bring me wildflowers and leave them on the porch without saying a word.
And others I recognize but can’t name. Younger wolves, bonds I touched briefly before they vanished.
They’re there. They’re alive. The relief is so sharp it hurts.
Then one of the bonds lights up. Not warmth.
Not connection. Pain. A scream of distress so acute it tears through the dream like a serrated blade.
A child. Young. Too young to have language for what’s happening to her.
The signal is ragged, exhausted, the frequency of a small creature who’s been hurting for a long time and has stopped expecting it to end.
I try to reach toward it. Try to hold the bond, feel the direction, find the distance.
But the pain swallows everything. It’s not my pain, yet it fills me completely.
The terror of a child in a room with no windows, where hands that aren’t gentle reach for her, where the wolf inside her is pressed flat against her ribs in the same way I’ve been pressing mine.
I can feel her trying to be small. Trying to disappear inside herself.
And underneath the child’s distress, from the other family clusters: a low, sustained frequency of despair. Not acute. Chronic. Wolves who’ve been enduring for months and have stopped believing anyone is coming.
I wake up screaming.
Not a sound I make often. Not a sound I’ve made since the night the raiders hit Ravenclaw and I thought Brenna was dead. It rips out of my throat and fills the motel room. Briar is on her feet before I’m fully conscious, knife in hand, scanning the windows and the door.
“What?” She’s at the window, checking the parking lot. “What is it?”
“I felt them.” I’m sitting up, drenched in sweat, my hands gripping the sheets. My canines have lengthened, my nails are sharp against the cotton, and the thread-sense is still live. Dimmer now that I’m awake, but the echo of the child’s distress makes my head throb. “The families. I felt them.”
Briar lowers the knife. Comes to the edge of my bed. Her face is unreadable in the dark, but her body language has shifted from combat readiness to attention.
“Tell me.”
“Family groups. South. They’re alive. I could feel individual bonds.
The Donovans, the Hartwells, a younger group I couldn’t identify.
” My breathing is ragged, and I force it to slow.
“One of the groups is damaged. Bonds torn, wolves missing from the cluster, or too weak to register. And there’s a child in pain.
Real pain, Briar. Not fear. Something is being done to her. ”
“Distance?”
“I don’t know. The signal was stronger than it’s ever been.
Could be my range expanding, could be the distress amplifying the connection.
” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
The child’s signal is still there. Faint now, exhausted, the quiet of a kid who’s given up crying because no one comes when she cries.
“Something’s happening to them. Right now. Tonight.”
Briar sits on her bed. Sets the knife on the nightstand.
“I finished the route yesterday,” she says. “The full line. I pushed through overnight, drove south, then tracked on foot through ranch country. Picked up the last section where the scent signatures concentrate around a fixed location. Sent the coordinates to Merric. He checked it out.”
She’s been ranging further than I realized.
Overnight trips. Driving hours, then tracking on foot through unfamiliar territory, alone, in the dark.
I knew she was pushing wider. I didn’t know she was pushing that far.
The fact that she did it without complaint or announcement is so purely Briar that I almost smile, despite the child’s signal still throbbing in my chest.
“The facility location matches Nadia’s satellite coordinates?” I ask.
“Within a mile. This is it, Willow. We know where they are.”
The confirmation should feel like victory. Instead, it feels like the starting gun of a race I’m not sure we’re fast enough to win.
I reach for the burner phone. The clock on the nightstand reads 1:47 a.m. I call Brenna anyway.
She answers on the second ring. Not groggy. Alert. Brenna doesn’t sleep the way other people sleep; she rests in shifts, the way she taught me to during the raids. Three hours down, two hours watchful, repeat.
“What happened?”
I give her everything. The dream. The thread-sense spike. The family groups confirmed alive. One damaged. A child in active distress. Briar’s completed route terminating at the facility coordinates.
Brenna is quiet for a beat. When she speaks, her voice has changed, the aunt gone, the handler in full command.
“Nadia contacted me six hours ago. Aurora intercepted chatter from Syndicate-adjacent channels. The facility is preparing to transfer captives to a secondary location. Deeper south, harder to reach. Jericho says it’s standard Syndicate protocol when they suspect an operation’s been flagged.”
My stomach drops. “Flagged how?”
“Not sure. Maybe someone’s heard we’ve been asking questions.”
Goddammit!
“How long do we have?” I ask.
“Days. Once transfer protocols start, the window closes fast. If they move those wolves to a secondary site, we may never find them again.”
“Then we go now.”
“Not without force, and not without a plan.” Iron in her voice.
“Merric’s mobilizing. His full team: Rook, Sienna, Dane.
Our Ravenclaw fighters are ready. Nadia and Jericho are already moving south.
They’ll reach you within a day.” A pause.
“But I need the full team in position before we hit that compound. We go in half-strength, we lose people.”
“And if we wait too long, we lose the captives.”
“I know. Believe me, Willow, I know.” A rare crack in the alpha voice.
Then she seals it. “We work fast. Two things I need from you. First, route the Bern misinformation. I’m sending you the details now.
We need to know if his network touches this facility before we go in, because if it does, he could tip them off about the assault. ”
“And second?”
“The contact number. The one the Forrester enforcer uses to call in the pickups. If Jericho can trace it, he can crack the communication network between the purist packs and the facility. That gives us their internal intel. It could be the difference between a clean extraction and walking into a kill box.”
The contact number. The one Conner must use to arrange his pickups.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
“How?”
“Leave that to me.”
A pause. Brenna reading the tone. Hearing what I’m not saying. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Route the misinformation. Get the number, get moving south. I want you and Briar within striking distance of the facility by the time the team arrives. Ground-level reconnaissance. Approach routes, security patterns, anything the satellites can’t give us.”
“Understood.”
“And Willow… the timeline has changed. No more slow play. Get what you need and get out of Cedar Falls.”
“Copy.” I end the call, then sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, the phone warm in my hand, the child’s terror still echoing. The clock reads 1:53 a.m. Six minutes. Six minutes to confirm what I’ve been chasing for weeks and to learn that the window for saving them is closing.
Briar is watching me. Waiting.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” I say. “Dawn. Brenna’s mobilizing everyone. Merric, Nadia, Jericho, the fighters. They’ll be in position within days.”
“And the contact number?”
“I’ll get it tonight.”
Briar’s eyes narrow a fraction. She doesn’t ask how. She can see the answer forming in my face, and she’s too professional to comment on it. What she says instead is: “You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.”
“There might be other ways to—”
“There aren’t. Not tonight. Not in the time we have.” I pull the second phone from the nightstand drawer. “I know where it is. I know how to get to it. And I know he’ll let me in.”
I hate myself for saying it. Because what I’m about to do isn’t intelligence work.
It isn’t operational necessity dressed in professional language.
It’s using a man’s body to get access to his phone, and the fact that my body will respond to his—genuinely, hungrily, the way it always does—doesn’t make it better.
It makes it worse. It means the betrayal is authentic.
I compose the Bern misinformation first. Brief, coded, routed through the channel Brenna specified. A fabricated safe house location fed into a network that Bern can access. If it reaches the facility, his web extends this far south. I send it. Put the phone down.
Then I pick up the other phone. The one with Conner’s number in it.
My hands are steady. The child’s panic twists in my chest: faint, constant, a frequency I can’t unhear. Somewhere out there, a little girl is in pain, and the number I need to help find her is stored in the phone of a man I can reach if I choose to.
I type: Are you awake?
The response comes in under a minute. He wasn’t sleeping either.
Yeah. You okay?
Two words. You okay. Not what do you want, or it’s 2 a.m. The concern is automatic. Genuine.
I close my eyes. Breathe. Open them.
Can I see you?
The pause is longer this time. Maybe thirty seconds. I can picture him in the dark, reading the message, his wolf responding before his brain catches up.
His reply: an address. A house on Sycamore Road, south edge of town. Then: Door’s open.
I reach for my clothes. Briar watches me from her bed, silent. I don’t explain. She doesn’t ask. I’m halfway to the door when she speaks.
“Willow.”
I stop. Don’t turn.
“Get the number. Get out. Don’t linger.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. Be careful.”
I step outside. The night seems huge; the sky overhead feels like a canopy of stars.
You can do this, Willow.
The motel parking lot is empty. My truck is the only vehicle.
The drive to Sycamore Road takes minutes.
I drive it with the windows down, letting the cold air sharpen me, because what I’m about to do requires a woman who’s fully present and fully in control, and the child’s signal in my chest is trying to shatter both.
His house is modest. Clapboard and natural stone, set back from the road, a porch with a single light on. The kind of place a man lives alone in: clean, functional, the porch railing repaired recently, the lawn mowed by someone who does it out of habit rather than pride. His truck is in the drive.
I park behind it. Sit for a moment. The child’s signal pulses. Faint. Constant.
I get out. Walk to the porch. The door is unlocked, the way he said it would be.
I push it open. He’s standing in the hallway, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt he pulled on in a hurry. His hair is mussed. In the dim light from the kitchen, his face is open and unguarded and so goddamn relieved to see me that my heart melts.
I bury it. The way I’ve buried everything else. Deep, fast, total.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” He searches my face. “What’s going on? You’ve been—”
I step forward, take his face in my hands, and kiss him.
Not cold. Not calculated. The kiss is real—it has to be real, or he’ll know—and the moment my mouth touches his, the rage and the mission and the child’s pain all go quiet under the deafening roar of my body remembering what it wants. My wolf waking up.
He pulls me inside. The door closes behind us.