Chapter 22
Conner
I spend the day in the compound office, going through the files I’ve already seen and looking for the ones I haven’t.
The relocation records are where I left them: thirty-seven folders, thirty-seven transfers, thirty-seven dead ends.
But this time I’m not looking at destinations. I’m looking at money.
It takes me three hours to find the ledger. Not in the filing cabinets. In a locked drawer in the desk that I’ve never had reason to open. The lock is old, a simple tumbler, and I pick it with a fence staple in under a minute. Garrett would be embarrassed.
Inside: a leather-bound ledger, the kind ranchers used before computers.
My father’s handwriting: tight, precise, the penmanship of a man who learned to write in a one-room schoolhouse.
The entries go back ten years. Dates in one column.
Dollar amounts in another. And in a third column, a notation that corresponds to each relocation file: a number, a date, and the word RECEIVED.
Payments. Timed to relocations. Every time a magic-blooded wolf was walked to the junction and loaded into a truck, money came in.
I count the entries. They match the files. Thirty-seven payments over ten years. The ledger goes back before my time as enforcer. The earlier entries are in smaller amounts. The later ones are larger. The program scaled up. More wolves, more money. Supply meeting demand.
My hands are steady. The rest of me is not.
I close the ledger. Lock the drawer. Put the fence staple in my pocket. Walk out of the office into the late afternoon sun.
The compound is quiet. Most of the pack is in the west pasture, moving cattle.
Tate is at the training grounds, running drills with two younger wolves.
My mother is in the garden beside the main house, pulling weeds with the focused aggression of a woman who’d rather fight the earth than deal with what’s happening inside her family.
I walk past all of them to the porch. My father is in his chair. He sees me coming and doesn’t look away. He’s been waiting for this. Maybe for years.
I sit in the chair beside him. The same chair Garrett uses for beers and sunsets. The wood is warm from the afternoon heat.
“Tell me,” I say.
He’s quiet for a long time. His hands rest on the chair arms… not gripping this time. Flat. Palms down. As if he’s bracing himself against the wood to keep from floating away.
“After Maren died,” he says, “I couldn’t think straight. For months. Your mother was… she was destroyed. Garrett took over the pack because I couldn’t function. I’d get up in the morning, and I’d stand in the kitchen, and I wouldn’t know why I was there.” He pauses. “You remember.”
“I remember.”
“About six months after, a man came to see me. I didn’t know his name then.
I don’t know it now; he never gave one. He said he represented people who shared our concerns about magic-blooded wolves.
People with resources. He said they were building a network to remove magic-bloods from pack territories across the south.
Containment, he called it. A coordinated program. ”
“Syndicate.”
My father flinches at the word. Not denial—recognition. “I didn’t use that word. Neither did he. But I knew what he was. I knew the kind of people who have that kind of infrastructure. I knew they weren’t running a goddamn resettlement charity.”
The admission is quiet. Matter-of-fact. The voice of a man who made a decision a decade ago and has been sitting with it every day since.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew they weren’t being placed in safe communities.”
“I knew they weren’t coming back. That’s what I wanted.
I wanted them gone. Off my land. Out of my territory.
I wanted every wolf carrying magic to disappear, because one of them killed my little girl, and I couldn’t—” His voice breaks.
For a second, the old man surfaces… the father, not the alpha, the man who watched his fourteen-year-old while she bled out on Forrester soil.
Then he pulls himself back. “I couldn’t let it happen again. ”
“So you made a deal.”
“I made a deal. The network would handle removal. We’d cooperate: identify magic-bloods on our territory, escort them to a handoff point. In exchange, they’d ensure our land stayed clean. And they’d compensate us for the service.”
“Compensate.” The word makes my lip curl. “You mean they paid us. Per head.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“It varied. More for families. More for…” He stops.
“More for what?”
The silence stretches. My mother has stopped pulling weeds. She’s standing with her hands at her sides, facing the garden, but her head is turned toward the porch. Listening.
“More for children,” my father says. “Young wolves. They paid more for the young ones.”
The ground lurches under me. Not physically. The porch is solid stone, built to last three lifetimes. But something inside me moves, the foundation I’ve been standing on for a decade sliding sideways to reveal what’s underneath.
They paid more for children. The eight-year-old in the ravine. The toddler on his mother’s hip. The families I walked to the junction… the younger the kids, the more money came in.
“Did you know what they were doing to them?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “In the facilities. Did you know?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“That’s not what I asked you. Did you know?”
My father looks at me. And for the first time in the conversation, his eyes are wet. Not crying… he’s too far gone for crying, too hollowed out by a decade of knowing what he did. But the moisture is there, the body’s acknowledgment of something the mind has been refusing.
“I heard things,” he says. “Over the years. From the contact. References to procedures. To extraction. To… viability assessments.” His jaw works.
“I didn’t want to understand what those words meant.
So I didn’t. I locked them away, and I didn’t think about them.
I sat in this goddamn chair, and I watched you drive families to that junction, and I never said a word. ”
He’s shaking, his whole body; a fine tremor that starts in his hands and works through his shoulders. The big man in the rocking chair, the alpha who built this ranch, shaking like a leaf in a storm he created.
“And Garrett?” I ask.
“Garrett inherited the program when he took over. I told him what I’d told you: that the network placed wolves in appropriate communities. I gave him the contact number. I gave him the protocol.”
“Did you tell him the truth?”
“I told him what he needed to keep the program running. He didn’t push. He didn’t want to push. Your brother is a lot of things, Conner, but he’s not a man who asks questions when the answers might interfere with his duty.”
So Garrett maintained the system in genuine—or willful—ignorance. He believed, or chose to believe, the same story I believed. The difference between my father and Garrett is that my father knew the story was a lie and told it anyway.
“You should have told us,” I say. “Years ago.”
“I know.”
“People are dying. Wolves. Children. In facilities that you—”
“I know, goddammit!” His voice cracks. “I know, Conner. You think I don’t know?
You think I sit in this chair every day and don’t feel it?
Every file you brought back. Every family you walked to that road.
I watched you do it, and I knew where they were going, and I couldn’t make myself say the words because saying them would have meant—”
“Would have meant admitting you sent them to die.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
The screen door opens. My mother steps onto the porch.
Her face is set in the expression I know from childhood.
The look she wears when she’s decided something is not going to happen.
Arguments, questions, challenges to the way things are.
That look has shut down more conversations in this family than Garrett’s alpha voice ever has.
“That’s enough!” she says.
“It’s not enough, Ma. It’s not close to enough.”
“Your father made decisions to protect this family. After what happened to Maren—”
“Stop using Maren,” I growl, a low rumble in my chest, audible, unmistakable. My mother takes a half-step back. I’ve never raised my wolf at her before. Never come close. “Maren died from a stray wolf’s ward. She didn’t die so we could sell children to the goddamn Syndicate.”
“You don’t know what they do with them. Nobody knows for certain—”
“The woman I was with. Willow.” Saying her name costs me something I don’t examine. “She had a cousin. Seventeen years old. The Syndicate had him. They cut him open. Tortured him. He barely survived. He was seventeen, Ma. And we’ve been sending wolves younger than that into the same system.”
My mother’s face doesn’t change. But her hands—folded in front of her—tighten against each other. The knuckles pull taut.
“She told you that,” my mother says. “The magic-blood girl. You’re taking her word over your family’s.”
“I’m taking the evidence. The ledger. The payments. Dad just confirmed they paid more for children. What kind of program pays a premium for kids?”
The question hangs in the evening air. The garden is still. The western ridge is losing its gold, the shadows stretching across the compound like creeping fingers.
My mother looks at my father. He doesn’t look back. He’s staring at his hands, flat on the chair arms, trembling.
“We did what we had to do,” my mother says, her jaw set.
“To children, Ma!”
“Magic-blooded children, Conner,” she snaps back. “They hardly matter.”
I stare at her, speechless. This woman who birthed me. Raised me. Guided me through my first shifts. Held my hand when we walked into church together.
And I don’t recognize her.
I stand. I can’t be here. Can’t sit on this porch with these people—my parents, my blood—and process what they’ve done. What I’ve helped them do. For years.
“Where are you going?” my mother asks.
“Out.”
“Conner—”
“I need to think. And I can’t do it here.”
I walk off the porch. Past the garden. Past the training grounds where Tate is still running drills. Past the barn my grandfather built—the one where you shelter the animals first, because the animals don’t have a choice.
The animals don’t have a choice. The wolves we relocated didn’t have a choice. The children we loaded into trucks didn’t have a choice. And I didn’t give them one, because I believed the story my father told me, and I never asked what was on the other end of the road.
I get in my truck. Drive east, toward the Brennan hollow where the Oklahoma family camped weeks ago. I park where I parked then, sit on the ridge, and look at the empty clearing below. The dead fire pit, the tire tracks in the mud, the absence where people used to be.
They were clean. No magic. I let them stay.
If they’d had magic, I’d have walked them to the junction.
Called the number. Waited for the truck.
And the money would have come, and the ledger would have gained another entry, and two more children would have vanished into a system built on my sister’s grave and paid for in increments that increased with youth.
My wolf makes a sound. Not a growl, not a whine. Something raw and low and sustained, like an animal caught in a trap it can’t see, pulling against a wound that gets worse with every movement.
I sit on the ridge until the stars come out.
I think about Maren. About the stray wolf who lost control of a ward and killed a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to see everything and go everywhere and know everyone.
I think about how that death turned into a program that has now, according to the ledger, processed thirty-seven wolves across a decade.
Wolves who went south and didn’t come back.
I think about Willow. Her voice at the swimming hole, talking about a cousin who was cut open. Her voice in the diner, asking questions I knew meant something more than curiosity. Her voice in the dark of my house, saying my name like it meant something.
Was she lying? About all of it?
The enforcer says: She lied about everything.
The wolf says: Not everything.
The man says: I need to find out.
I pull out my phone. Stare at the screen. At the text that arrived the night everything changed.
I’m not going to bring her back. Garrett can go to hell with his orders.
But I’m going to find her. Because she came here looking for the truth about wolves my family sent to die. And now I know enough of that truth to choke on it.
And I think she might be the only person in the world who’ll help me learn the rest.