Chapter 24
Conner
I find Garrett in the meeting hall at dawn. He’s alone, which is rare. The hall is empty, and he’s standing at the table with the territory map spread in front of him and a cup of coffee going cold beside it.
He looks up when I walk in. Reads my face. His expression closes like a door.
“You didn’t go after them,” he says.
“No.”
“That was an order, Conner.”
“I know what it was.” I stop on the other side of the table. The map between us shows Forrester territory in detail: every boundary, every ridge, every road. The handoff junction on the county road is marked with a small red dot. I’ve never noticed the dot before. Now I can’t stop looking at it.
“I talked to Dad.”
Garrett goes still. Not the alpha-still he uses in pack meetings. Something more guarded. “About what?”
“The ledger. The payments. All of it.” I keep my voice level. “He told me everything, Garrett.”
“Where did you—?”
“The desk in the office. The lock took me thirty seconds.” I put my hands on the table. “He knew they weren’t being resettled. Knew they weren’t going someplace safe. He told me to my face.”
Garrett’s jaw works. His coffee sits untouched. For a moment, the space feels suspended. Two brothers on opposite sides of a table, a map between them, the red dot staring up at both of us.
“Dad was grieving,” Garrett says. “He wasn’t thinking clearly. He made decisions that—”
“He made a deal with the Syndicate to sell magic-blooded wolves. Including children. And then he handed the program to you, and you ran it for a decade. You called it protocol. You called it containment. You built a whole vocabulary around it so nobody had to say what it actually was.”
“And what was it actually, Conner? You tell me. Because from where I stood, it was the system that kept this pack safe after a fourteen-year-old girl died because some stray wolf couldn’t control his magic.”
“You’re going to use Maren to justify selling children.”
“I’m not justifying—”
“The facilities aren’t resettlement centers, Garrett. They’re labs. They experiment on magic-blooded wolves. Cut them open. All of them.”
Garrett’s expression doesn’t change. The alpha mask holds.
“You have that from the Ravenclaw woman,” he says. “An intelligence operative who was manipulating you. She’ll say whatever she needs to turn you against your own pack.”
“This isn’t about her. This is about the ledger. Dad’s handwriting. Payments per head—more for families, more for children. That’s not her word. That’s his.”
“The ledger is Dad’s business, not mine.”
“Bullshit.” I snarl the word. “You signed the assessment forms. You set the protocol. You told me where to take them and who to call. You might not have banked the checks, but you built the system that earned them.”
“A system that works.”
“Works for who? Not for the wolves in those trucks. Not for the kids I loaded into the back of a vehicle—”
“You don’t know what happens to them. You have the word of a woman who lied to you—”
“I have Dad’s word. He chose the Syndicate. And you maintained it.”
Garrett is quiet for a count of five. The longest silence of the conversation. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped. Not the alpha command tone; something lower, rawer. The brother, surfacing.
“What would you have had me do? Dad was broken. The pack needed leadership. I had a program in place that removed the one thing that killed our sister. Was I supposed to dismantle it?”
“You were supposed to ask questions.”
“I asked the questions that mattered. Are our wolves safe? Is the territory pure? The answers were yes.”
“And the question you didn’t ask: where do the wolves go after we hand them over?”
“That wasn’t my—”
“It was. The second you put a family in a truck, what happens next is your responsibility. You don’t get to draw a line at the junction and say everything south of it is someone else’s problem.”
He stares at me. I stare back. The red dot on the map sits between us like an accusation.
“Forget the magic for a moment.” My voice is cold. “The children, Garrett. Fucking children. Did you ever—for one second—think about what was happening to them?”
The flicker. I see it: a beat where the mask shifts and something looks out from behind it that isn’t the alpha, isn’t the politician. Something that might be horror. Or might be the recognition that horror is what he should have been feeling all along, arriving ten years too late.
He kills it. Fast. The mask seals.
“The program is what it is. I won’t apologize for protecting my people. And I won’t let a magic-blood’s sob story dismantle everything this family built.”
I look at my brother. I see the man who taught me to track when I was ten.
The man who held the pack together after Dad collapsed.
The man who sat with me the night Maren died and said, “We’ll make sure this never happens again.
” And I believed him because he was my brother, and believing him was easier than thinking about what “never again” actually required.
I believed him for ten years. I did what was expected of me. And every time I came back, his approval was waiting. Good work. Clean operation. Protocol followed.
Protocol followed.
“I’m done,” I say.
Garrett’s expression shifts. Not surprise; he saw this coming. The calculation in his eyes is already running: what this means for the pack, for security, for the program.
“You walk out of here, and you’re walking away from your pack,” he says. “Your family. Everything you are.”
“Everything I was.”
“There’s no coming back from this, Conner.”
“I know.”
We look at each other. Ten years of duty and shared grief stretched between us like a wire about to snap.
“Whoever she is,” Garrett says quietly, “she’s not worth this.”
“This isn’t about her. This is about what we fucking did.”
I walk toward the door.
“If you go to her,” Garrett says behind me, “I’ll know. And I’ll assume everything you know about this pack’s operations is compromised.”
I stop. Don’t turn. “You should assume that anyway.”
I walk out.
My father is on the porch. I didn’t expect him.
It’s early, and he hasn’t been an early riser since he gave up the alpha seat.
But he’s there. Standing, not sitting. The rocking chair empty behind him.
He’s dressed. Boots on. His hands are at his sides, and his face has the expression of a man who’s been waiting for this moment for longer than this morning.
He heard. The meeting hall isn’t soundproofed. He heard every word.
We look at each other. Father and son. The man who built the program and the man who ran it, standing on a porch where three generations of Forresters have made decisions about who belongs on this land and who doesn’t.
“You’re leaving,” he says.
“Yes.”
His mouth opens. Closes. Whatever he wants to say—an apology, a defense, a plea—gets stuck behind the same wall that’s kept him silent for years.
The wall he built after Maren, the one that turned a grieving father into a man who could sell children and sit in a rocking chair and not speak about it.
“Take care of yourself, son,” he says finally.
It’s not enough. It’s not close to enough. But it’s the only door he knows how to open, and I can see the effort it costs him.
“Goodbye, Pop.”
I walk through the compound. Past the barn. Past the training grounds. Past the pencil marks on the doorframe. My mother drew those lines with a carpenter’s pencil every birthday, and after Maren was gone, the pencil went into a drawer and never came out.
I get in the truck. I don’t drive south immediately.
I drive east. To the ridge.
The place where my sister died is fifteen minutes from the compound.
An outcrop overlooking the eastern valley, where the forest thins and the sky opens up.
The stray wolf’s camp is long gone. The blast scar has healed over, the rock darkened but covered now with lichen and scrub.
The only sign that anything happened here is a small marker stone that my father placed a month after the funeral. No inscription. Just a stone.
I sit on the ridge. The morning is bright. Below me, the valley stretches east. The same valley I’ve patrolled for a decade, the same ridgelines I’ve run in wolf form, the same terrain I’ve loved my entire life.
This land made me. The dirt is in my bones, and the water is in my blood, and the cedar is in my lungs.
Leaving it is going to hurt in ways I can’t prepare for.
Not the sharp pain of a break but the slow ache of something essential being removed, the phantom limb of a territory that’s no longer mine.
But the land didn’t build the pipeline. The land didn’t sell children. The land didn’t watch families drive south into a system designed to cut them open.
I did that. My family did that. On this land, using its roads and its ridgelines and its quiet places where no one asks questions.
I touch the marker stone. Warm from the sun. Maren’s stone.
I’m sorry, Mare. For all of it. For what they did in your name. For what I did.
I’m going to try to fix it.
I stand. Walk back to the truck.
I pull out my phone and type a message to the burner number:
I’m out. Left the pack. I have the physical ledger and the files. I know you don’t trust me. You shouldn’t. But I know things about the pipeline that could help your operation, and I’m not going to sit in Cedar Falls while wolves rot in a facility my family helped fill.
Tell me where to meet you. Somewhere neutral. I’ll come alone.
The response takes forty minutes. I sit on the ridge while the morning deepens and the shadows shorten and the Hill Country does what it always does: goes on being beautiful regardless of what the wolves on it have done.
My phone buzzes.
An address. A truck stop off the interstate, south of San Marcos. Then: Come alone. If I smell anyone else, you’ll never see me again.
I start the engine. Pull off the ridge. Drive through the compound one last time, the gate passing on either side, the Forrester name on the post, the boundary between my world and everything else.
I don’t look in the mirror.
The highway stretches south. Three hours to San Marcos. The landscape I’ve known my whole life becoming unfamiliar, mile by mile, as I drive toward a woman who has every reason to hate me and a truth I’m no longer willing to run from.
My wolf faces forward. Toward whatever comes next.
The bracelet is warm on my wrist. Maren’s stone on the ridge behind me, growing smaller in the distance I won’t measure.
I’m going to try to fix it.
I don’t know if I can. But I’m going to try.