Chapter 23
Willow
The air in the motel room is buzzing. A ward, tight and dense, is wrapped around the beds.
Stronger than anything I’ve ever intentionally built.
The magic vibrates against my awareness, hot and volatile, and when I reach for it to take it down, it resists.
Pushes back. As if the power doesn’t want to let go.
I dismantle it in stages. Layer by layer. By the time the last thread dissolves, my hands are shaking, and there’s sweat on my face.
“Third time it’s happened,” Briar says. “The last one nearly woke Nadia next door.”
“I know.”
“You need to get a handle on this.”
“I know, Briar.”
She doesn’t push. But the look she gives me before she lies back down says she’s logged this under problems that are getting worse.
She’s right. Something is wrong with my magic.
Not wrong in the way a machine malfunctions.
Wrong in the way a river floods. There’s more of it than there used to be, and it’s not behaving.
The wards I throw in my sleep are one symptom.
Yesterday, when Jericho said something that irritated me during the planning session, the air around my hands shimmered with heat.
No fire. No ward formation. Just energy, leaking from my skin.
Jericho saw it. Didn’t comment. But he moved his laptop to the other side of the table.
And the thread-sense has changed. It’s sharper than it was in Cedar Falls.
I can feel the families in the facility with painful clarity, individual bonds, individual levels of distress.
But it’s also reaching in directions I don’t direct it.
Searching for something to the north with a persistence I can’t override.
I tell myself it’s the stress. The proximity to the facility.
The children’s fear agitating my wolf, who’s been volatile since I saw that photo.
The wolf is angry. Wounded. Straining against the containment I’ve held for days.
And the magic seems to respond to her agitation, flaring when she pushes, settling when she retreats.
That’s the explanation. It has to be. Because the alternative—that the hollowness in my chest and the northward pull are connected to a man I left sleeping on Sycamore Road—is not something I’m prepared to consider.
Morning. Nadia has set up in her room: laptop, satellite feeds, comms equipment that emerged from their van in a steady stream. The four of us work the facility layout. Jericho cracked the relay network, and he’s been monitoring the facility’s internal communications for hours.
“They’re nervous,” he says. Quiet, precise, a man who spent years inside the Syndicate and learned to read their patterns the way Briar reads terrain. “Increased chatter on the security channels. Someone’s flagged something. They’re tightening up, and they’ve doubled the internal guard rotation.”
“How long before they start moving captives?” Nadia asks.
“If they’re this jumpy, days. Maybe sooner.”
The urgency is a physical pressure. I can feel the families—right there, forty minutes south—and the knowledge that the window is closing makes my magic flare. I have to consciously pull it back. Breathe. Hold.
My phone rings. Not Brenna’s number. I stare at the screen, and it takes me two seconds to place it.
Then my stomach drops. The text I sent at 2 a.m. the night I went to his house.
Are you awake? I gave him this number myself.
Handed it to him like an amateur while I was busy planning how to steal from his phone.
Shit.
What the fuck was I thinking?
I wasn’t.
I stare at it. Four rings. Five. Briar looks at me, then at the phone, then back at me.
I answer.
“Willow.” His voice is different. Not the warmth I’m used to, not the rough tenderness of the man who held me in his bed. Cold. Controlled. Stripped of everything except purpose. “Or should I say Willow Corvus. Ravenclaw pack. Magic-blooded.”
I suck in a breath. Fuck. I knew this might happen… the moment I left Cedar Falls. But hearing my full name in his voice, spoken with the level precision of an enforcer identifying a target, turns something inside me to ice.
“Conner.”
“Was any of it real?” No preamble. No warmth. Just the blade. “The Railhead. The truck. Coming to my house in the middle of the night. Was I just the job? The mark you fucked for information?”
“That’s not—”
“Because I’ve been going back through every conversation.
Every question you asked. Every time you steered me toward the relocations, the boundary protocols, the pipeline.
You were extracting intelligence. The whole time.
And I just… I sat there and handed it to you because I thought—” He stops.
When he speaks again, his voice is rougher.
“What did you think was going to happen? You’d get what you needed and disappear?
Leave me waking up in an empty bed, wondering what the hell I did wrong? ”
“You want to know what you did wrong?” The anger comes fast, clean, welcome.
Easier than the guilt. Easier than the pain behind my ribs that spiked the instant I heard his voice.
“You walked families with children to a truck that carried them to hell. You executed a program that feeds wolves to the Syndicate, and you did it for years. You know what’s wrong, Conner?
Everything. Everything about what your pack does to wolves like me. ”
“Wolves like you. Magic-bloods.”
“People. Families. Children. You remember my cousin? He was seventeen, and he barely made it. And you’ve been loading toddlers onto trucks headed for the same thing.”
The silence that follows is so long I check the screen to make sure the call hasn’t dropped.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know what happened to them.”
“Spare me the bullshit,” I snap.
“I swear to you, I had no fucking idea, Willow!” Something in his voice makes me pause, but it doesn’t make things better.
“Then you didn’t want to know. You didn’t know because knowing would have made it harder to keep doing your job, and your job was the only thing holding you together after your sister died.
” I’m shaking. Not from anger, from the effort of keeping my voice steady while something inside me tears at the sound of his pain.
“So don’t you dare call me and ask if any of it was real while you’re standing on a foundation built out of missing people. ”
“And what you did is better?” His voice hardens, the hurt crystallizing into something sharper.
“You sat next to me. Ate with me. Laughed with me. Let me take you to a place I hadn’t shared with anyone since my sister died.
Let me touch you. And the whole time, you were working me.
Filing away everything I said. Reporting it back to whoever sent you. ”
“Yes.” I don’t flinch from it. “I was.”
“And the night you came to my house. Was that the job too? You needed something, so you showed up and fucked me for it?”
“Don’t—”
“You came to my door. You kissed me. You stayed. And before I woke up, you took what you needed and left without a word. So tell me, Willow—tell me how that’s different from what I did. I walked wolves to trucks. You walked into my bed to steal from my phone.”
The comparison is obscene. I know it’s obscene. He’s equating sex under false pretenses with feeding children into a system that cuts them apart. They’re not the same. They’re not even in the same universe of moral weight.
The accusation stabs anyway. Because underneath the false equivalence, there’s a splinter of truth: I did use his body to access his phone. I did kiss him knowing I was there to steal from him. And the fact that my reasons were righteous doesn’t make the act clean.
“We both do things that are morally reprehensible,” I say. “The difference is, what I did might save lives. What you did ended them.”
Another silence. Then: “You used me. You slept with me to get information. You came to my house and you—” His voice breaks. Reassembles. “You whored yourself for a fucking phone number.”
The word lands. It’s designed to hurt, and it does—a slash across something already raw. My wolf howls from the place I’ve buried her, not in rage but in anguish, the sound of an animal that recognizes its other half inflicting damage and can’t make it stop.
I don’t let the hurt color my voice.
“Call it whatever makes you feel righteous. I’ll take that word over the one the families in your trucks would use for you.”
The silence stretches. I hear him breathing. Rough. Uneven. The sound of a man holding himself together the way I’m holding myself together: by force of will.
When he speaks again, the cruelty is gone. What’s left is something worse: honesty.
“I found the ledger,” he says. Very quietly. “My father’s. They were paid for every wolf they relocated. More for families.” A pause. “More for children.”
The information registers through the rage. Payments. For lives. More for children.
“Your father,” I say.
“He made the deal. After Maren. He knew what they were: Syndicate, or close enough. He told us that they were being taken to be resettled. But he knew that wasn’t true.
Knew they weren’t coming back.” His voice is raw.
“Garrett maintained the program. I executed it. And none of us asked what was on the other end of the road because asking would have meant admitting what we were.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t have anything to say that won’t make this worse or better, and I’m not sure which outcome I’m more afraid of.
“I’m not calling to apologize,” he says. “And I’m not calling because I think you owe me anything. I’m calling because I found the evidence, and I need someone to know. Someone who’ll do something about it.”
“What evidence?”
“The ledger. Payment records going back ten years. Communication logs. Enough to prove the Forresters were a paid feeder operation for a Syndicate network.” A pause. “And enough to start tracing the financial connections to whoever’s running the facilities.”
The intelligence operative in me locks on. Financial records tracing back to the facility network. That’s the kind of evidence the Aurora Collective could use to crack the entire operation. Not just the compound we’re targeting, but the wider system.
“Send it to me,” I say.
“It’s not digital. It’s a handwritten ledger and paper files. I’d have to bring it.”
“No.”
“Willow—”
“I’m not telling you where we are. Photograph the pages and send the images to this number.”
A long pause. “All right. I’ll send what I have.” Then, quieter: “For what it’s worth… the things you said about your cousin. About the children. I believe you. I didn’t want to. But I do.”
The call ends. I set the phone on the bed.
The room is very quiet. Briar, Nadia, and Jericho are all silent. Nobody speaks. Nadia is looking at her laptop screen with the studied concentration of a woman giving me privacy by pretending she can’t hear. Jericho hasn’t moved.
Briar has been watching me the entire time. She doesn’t ask what was said; as usual, she read enough from my side.
“He found financial records,” I say. My voice sounds distant. Professional. The operative, not the woman who just had her chest opened by a phone call. “Payments from the Syndicate to the Forresters. Per-head compensation for every wolf they relocated. He’s sending images.”
“Can Jericho use them?” Briar asks.
Jericho answers before I can. “If they include routing information for the payments, we can trace the financial network back to the facility’s operational funding. That gives us the entire pipeline structure.”
“He’s sending them now.”
Briar nods. Then, after a moment: “He said he didn’t know?”
“He said a lot of things.”
“Maybe.” Her expression darkens. Her pencil pierces the map she’s tracing. “But the other one knew.”
“The other one?” I frown at her.
“The brother. Garrett. He definitely knew.” There’s an edge to her voice. It’s not the level tone she uses for everything else. Something harder. More personal. As if Garrett Forrester occupies a sharpened place in Briar’s mind that’s different from the space she gives to any other target.
I notice. I don’t have the capacity to examine it right now. But I take note of it: the way she says his name, the way her hand tightens on the pencil when she traces the route his pack’s wolves took our families down. It’s too personal for Briar. And Briar doesn’t do personal.
My phone buzzes. Images arriving. One after another… photographs of ledger pages, handwritten entries, dates, dollar amounts. I forward them to Jericho without reading them.
Another buzz. Brenna.
“The Bern misinformation hit its mark. The fabricated safe house location was passed to a contact connected to the facility’s security network within eighteen hours. Bern’s reach extends to the facility directly.”
“Which means if Bern knows about our operation—”
“He doesn’t. The misinformation was isolated. But it confirms the scope. When this is over, we deal with him.” A pause. “Is the team in position?”
“Nadia and Jericho are here. Briar’s got the approaches. We’re ready for the main force.”
“Merric’s twelve hours out. I’m with him. We hit the facility tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow night. Some of those families have been in that facility for months, maybe longer. The children have been suffering all that time.
And tomorrow night, we go in.
The thread-sense hums in my chest. The families. The children. The damaged bonds. And underneath all of it, the inexplicable pull toward a man who just called me a whore and then sent me the evidence to bring down his own family.
I close my eyes. Breathe. Open them.
Tomorrow night.