Chapter 27
Willow
The door blows inward, and I’m through it before the hinges stop screaming.
The facility’s interior is a maze. Corridors branching left and right, fluorescent strips buzzing overhead, the smell of antiseptic and confined wolves thick enough to choke on.
My thread-sense is already working: reaching ahead, feeling for the bonds I’ve been tracking for weeks.
They’re here. Close. The Ravenclaw signatures are unmistakable, even muffled by whatever dampening technology fills these walls.
I lead the breach team left. Briar is behind me, silent, knife drawn, covering our six. Two Ravenclaw fighters flank us, fur bristling over their powerful wolf forms, fangs gleaming in the flickering light.
The corridor is empty, but not for long. I can hear shouts echoing from somewhere deep in the building, the compound waking up to the fact that the assault isn’t just at the fences.
A guard rounds the corner ahead. He sees us and reaches for the weapon on his hip. Briar is past me before I register the movement, a blur of dark hair and intent, and the guard is on the floor with her knife at his throat.
“Which way to the holding cells?” she says. Calm as a woman asking for directions to the post office.
He points. She zip-ties him, and we move on.
The magic continues to guide me, pulling, tugging, the bonds getting louder with every step.
I can feel them individually now. Ravenclaw wolves.
My wolves. People I grew up beside, people I searched for, people who’ve been waiting in this place while I sat in a diner drinking coffee with the man who sent them here.
The anger is useful. I let it fuel the magic.
Wards snap into place ahead of us as we move, shields covering the corridor, deflecting a burst of gunfire from a second guard who appears at an intersection and fires three rounds before one of the Ravenclaw fighters takes him down.
The bullets hit my ward and dissolve into sparks.
The shield holds. Stronger than anything I’ve thrown before, stronger than it should be, the power flooding through me with a force that’s almost too much to control.
I don’t question it. Not now. The power is here, it does what I tell it, and the wolves behind these walls need it.
We reach the holding area. A heavy door, steel with an electronic lock.
I press my hands against it and feel for the energy underneath.
Syndicate magic, crude but effective, designed to suppress the wolves inside.
I push against it. My magic meets theirs, and for a second, it’s a contest, their suppression grinding against my power like stone against stone.
Then mine breaks through. The lock clicks.
Their defense shatters. The door swings open.
The room behind it is large, low-ceilinged, lit by buzzing fluorescents. And it’s full of wolves.
Not standing. Not fighting. Sitting. Lying.
Huddled in groups on thin mattresses laid out in rows.
The air is dense with the scent of confined creatures—unwashed bodies, old fear, the sour undertone of illness.
Some look up when the door opens. Others don’t; too exhausted, too beaten down, too deep in whatever the Syndicate has done to them to register that something has changed.
I count. Thirty, maybe more. Not just Ravenclaw.
Wolves from multiple packs, collected over months or years.
Some in terrible condition: thin, scarred, bandages on arms, throats.
A woman near the wall is cradling her arm against her chest, the wrist wrapped in cloth that’s been changed recently but not recently enough.
A man in the second row has the vacant stare of a wolf whose spirit left before his body did.
Among them, I see faces I recognize. The Hartwell family: Joanna and Ben and their son, thinner than I remember, not a teen anymore, Ben’s arm around Joanna’s shoulders in a grip that says he hasn’t let go in months.
The Donovans, a couple in their forties who disappeared eight months ago, sitting side by side with their hands linked.
Martin’s face turns toward the door with an expression that breaks me.
Hope. After everything. He still has hope.
In the far corner, sitting apart, two wolves I don’t recognize but who carry themselves with the careful stillness of survivors: a woman in her early twenties with short dark hair and steady eyes—watchful, assessing, not broken despite everything—and a man near thirty, quiet, positioned between her and the door as if guarding her out of habit.
“Ravenclaw?” the woman says. Her voice is rough from disuse.
“Yes. Plus Frostbourne. I’m Willow Corvus. We’re getting you out.”
Her expression changes. Recognition. The name means something to her.
“I’m Arden,” she says. “This is Lachlan.” She stands. Looks at the room full of wolves. “Some of them can’t walk.”
“We’ll carry them.”
I turn to the breach team. “Start moving them toward the south exit. Those who can walk, pair them with those who can’t. Go.”
The Ravenclaw fighters move into the room.
The evacuation begins. Slow, messy, the logistics of moving thirty traumatized creatures through a facility under assault.
Some resist, flinching from contact, pressing against walls, the reflexes of wolves who’ve learned that hands reaching for them mean pain.
Our fighters are patient. Gentle. They’ve been briefed.
I stand at the door and hold the ward open, my magic sustaining a corridor of protection between the holding room and the south exit.
Despite the dampening field, the power flows through me: steady, vast, more than I’ve ever channelled.
I can feel the wolves moving through my shield, each one registering as a presence, a bond, a life.
I’m the conduit. The thing that holds the path open while they walk through it.
And I can feel Conner.
Not through the radio. That’s been dead since we entered the building.
Through the pull. The same pull that connected us at the truck stop, that reached for him across a parking lot, that read his intentions before he opened his mouth.
He’s somewhere in the facility. East, I think.
The signal is muted by whatever’s inside these walls, but it’s there: warm, alive, fighting.
Then it vanishes.
One second, he’s there, a presence I’ve been tracking at the edge of my awareness. The next—nothing. A void where he was. As if someone reached into the signal and ripped the wire out.
Behind me, a voice. One of the Ravenclaw fighters, pressed against the corridor wall, hand on his earpiece. “What the hell just happened?”
Another voice, further back, someone with a line to the perimeter team: “East wing. The whole east side just went up. Secondary explosion; looks like they blew their own charges.”
“Fuck. The Forrester went in there. I saw him cross the open ground five minutes ago.”
The words reach me the way sound reaches you underwater. Delayed. Distorted. Arriving after the impact has already landed.
The east wing just went up. He went in there.
My magic falters. The ward I’m holding flickers. The lights in the corridor buzz and dim.
Something happens inside me that I’ve never felt before.
My wolf—the wolf I’ve been crushing for days, burying, denying—explodes from the dark place I put her with a force that nearly takes me off my feet.
She doesn’t ask permission. She doesn’t negotiate.
She tears through every wall I’ve built, and the sound that comes out of my throat is not human. It’s the howl of a wolf who’s lost her—
I can’t finish the thought. Can’t name what he is to me. Can’t do anything except stand in a corridor full of fleeing wolves with my magic unravelling and my wolf screaming into a void where the bond used to be.
The ward drops. For a full second, the corridor of protection dissolves, and the wolves inside it are exposed. A shot rings out somewhere behind us. Someone screams.
Briar grabs my arm. Hard. Her fingers digging in, her face close to mine, her grey eyes flat and cold and refusing to let me fall apart.
“Willow. These people need you. Right now. Whatever’s happening… hold it together.”
She’s right. The ward is down, and someone is shooting, and the wolves I came here to save are exposed because I can’t hold my magic together because he’s—
You don’t know that. You don’t know he’s dead. The signal could be shielding. Could be the blast disrupting the dampening field. Could be anything.
I rebuild the ward. Force my magic back into shape through the ruins of my control, piece by piece. It’s rough. Uneven. Nothing like the clean constructions I threw at the start of the assault. But it holds. It covers the corridor. They keep moving.
I hold it. I hold everything. The ward, the wolves, the evacuation, and the silence where I used to feel him. I can’t check. I can’t go to the east wing. I’m the only thing standing between thirty lives and the guards trying to end them.
So I stand here. I hold the ward. I do my job.
And underneath the job, in the place where the bond used to be, a thought surfaces that I can’t push back down: I never decided.
All those weeks of fighting the pull, burying the wolf, telling myself the anger was enough…
I never actually chose. I just refused to.
And now the choice might be gone, taken by a blast in a building I can’t reach, and the thing I feel isn’t rage or grief.
It’s the sick, plummeting certainty that I wasted something I can’t get back.
The thought lasts three seconds. I bury it the way I’ve buried everything else. There are wolves in this corridor who need me vertical.