Chapter 32
Conner
I wake with Willow’s hair across my chest and her breathing slow against my shoulder.
The cot is ridiculous. My feet hang off the end, my bad shoulder is wedged against the wall, and sometime in the night she threw a leg across mine that’s cutting off circulation to my left foot. It’s the best sleep I’ve had in months.
She shifts. Murmurs something I don’t catch. Presses closer, her face turning into my neck, and I tighten my arm around her because I can. Because she’s here. Because three days ago, I didn’t know if I’d ever touch her again.
When her breathing changes, I press my mouth to her hair.
“Morning,” she says against my chest.
“Morning.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me, and whatever she sees makes her mouth curve.
I yawn, stretch, and then grimace.
“Shoulder?” she asks.
“Stiff.”
“Liar.” She touches it through the shirt. Gentle, careful, her fingers exploring. “You slept on it wrong.”
“I slept on a cot built for a child with a woman sprawled across me. Everything’s wrong.”
“Complaining?”
“Happiest I’ve ever been.”
The smile widens. She leans down and kisses me, quick, firm, her hand on my jaw for a half-second. Then she’s pulling on her boots and heading for the door.
“I’ve got Arden’s debrief this morning. I’ll find you after.”
The door closes. The cabin is quiet. I lie on the cot that smells like her and listen to the valley waking up. Voices. A door. The creak of the lodge porch.
I give myself a minute of it. Then I get up.
I’m outside, heading for the equipment shed, when my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I check the screen, and my stomach drops.
“Conner.” Garrett’s voice. Taut. Controlled. The alpha frequency stripped of everything except authority. “I know where you are.”
The morning goes cold. Not fear. I’m past fear with Garrett. But the recognition that I’d been waiting for this call, and now it’s here, and whatever comes next is going to be ugly.
“Then you know I’m not coming back,” I say.
“Ellis tracked the convoy north. Three vehicles, one van, headed into Ravenclaw territory.” A pause. “You’re on their land. Living with the people who ran an intelligence operation against your own pack.”
“They ran an intelligence operation against a pack that was selling wolves to the Syndicate. There’s a difference.”
“Don’t lecture me.”
“Then don’t call me expecting me to apologize.”
Silence. The kind Garrett uses when he’s recalculating. I know every one of his silences: the dismissive ones, the dangerous ones, the ones where the alpha is deciding how far to push. This one is the third kind.
“You handed them the ledger,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Pop’s handwriting. The payment records. The communication logs. Everything.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?”
“I’ve given them what they needed to prove it. All of it. I didn’t hand them anything that wasn’t true, Garrett.”
“You’ve destroyed this family.”
“This family destroyed itself. I just opened the drawer.”
His breathing changes. Rougher. I’ve heard Garrett lose control exactly twice in my life: the night Maren died, and the morning I walked out of the meeting hall. This is the third time, and the sound tells me more about where he is than anything he’s said.
“They hit the facility,” he says. “The compound south of San Antonio… gone. Fire, structural damage. The network is calling it a coordinated assault.”
“It was.”
“And you were part of it?”
“I went into the east wing myself. Found seven children in a holding cell. Carried them out.”
“Children.” He says the word the way you’d say collateral. Already calculating the implications, not the human cost. That’s Garrett. Always the alpha first.
“A three-year-old girl. She’s here now. She sleeps holding my finger because I’m the first person who didn’t hurt her.”
“And this is supposed to change something?”
“It changed me. Whether it changes you is your problem.”
“My problem is that my brother handed our entire operation to a hostile pack and helped them burn a Syndicate asset. That’s what I’m dealing with, Conner. Not your crisis of conscience.”
“It’s not a crisis. The crisis was ten years long. This is the end of it.”
“No. This is the beginning of something worse.” His voice hardens. “You did all of this so you could fuck a magic-blood. The Corvus woman.”
“Her name is Willow. And she’s my mate.”
“Jesus Christ, Conner! You mated her?” His rage is practically crackling down the line. “A magic-blood. A Corvus. You let that bloodline into ours.”
“There is no ‘ours’ anymore, Garrett. I walked out.”
“You think walking out changes your blood? You’re a Forrester. That name goes to the bone. And you’ve polluted it with a woman whose kind killed our sister.”
“One wolf killed Maren. One unstable stray who couldn’t control his power.
Willow’s magic held a corridor open in a burning building while thirty wolves walked through it.
She threw wards that stopped bullets. She reached into a facility full of dampening technology and found every captive inside.
” I don’t need to sell this. I saw it. “That’s what magic is when it’s not something you’re afraid of.
It’s the most fucking incredible thing I’ve ever seen, and we spent a decade trying to stamp it out. ”
“She’s compromised you.”
“She’s shown me what we were destroying. And I watched it save lives.”
“Enough.” Full alpha authority. The frequency that makes wolves submit, that I’ve felt in my chest since I was old enough to shift.
It hits me through the phone, and my wolf bristles…
not in submission. In recognition of something he no longer answers to.
“You’ve handed our intelligence to a hostile pack, aided an armed assault on a Syndicate operation, and mated a magic-blood.
Any one of those is enough. Together?” A beat. “You’re dead to this pack, Conner.”
“I can live with that.”
“Can you live with what’s coming? Because the people we worked with aren’t going to absorb the loss of a facility quietly. That was infrastructure. Revenue.”
“You’re worried about the Syndicate.”
“I’m worried about what you’ve brought down on all of us. Ma. Pop. Every wolf on Forrester land.”
“Then you should have thought about that before you fed wolves into their machine for a decade.” I look across the valley.
Morning light on wet grass. Mist thinning in the low ground.
“I’ve spent three days with people who’ve been inside the Syndicate’s operation, Garrett.
Not the version we saw—the contact, the truck, the junction.
The actual thing. Facilities in at least four states.
Experimental extraction programs. Supply chains running across the entire south, feeding into something bigger than either of us could have imagined.
We weren’t partners in any of this. We were a line on a spreadsheet.
Forrester corridor — active. Now that line reads compromised, and somewhere in their system, someone is working out what to do about it. ”
“You think I don’t know we’re exposed?”
“I think you’re only starting to understand how badly.
The Syndicate doesn’t operate on grudges.
They operate on efficiency. A facility was lost. Product was lost. They’ll trace the breach, identify every weak point in the chain, and close them down.
Not with threats; with the full weight of an organization that’s been running this for longer than we’ve been alive.
They have resources we can’t fathom. We were nothing to them.
A supply line. And broken supply lines get replaced… after the loose ends are dealt with.”
“And you handed them the map to our front door.”
“They already had the map. They built the corridor through our land. They know every road, every junction, every contact point. The only thing that’s changed is that now other people know too.
” I pause. “The intelligence is being analyzed. Financial routing, communication logs, the full network. When it’s done, it goes before the wolf councils.
Every pack that used the pipeline. Every alpha who took payments. Including you.”
Silence. Heavy. Not the kind where Garrett is regrouping. The kind where a man is hearing something that won’t fit inside the story he’s been telling himself.
“You’d do that,” he says. “To your own brother. Your family.”
“You did worse to other people’s brothers. Other people’s children.”
Silence again. Then something seems to harden in him. A decision, maybe. Or just the walls going back up.
“There’s nothing left for you here,” he says. “If you come back to this territory, I can’t protect you. The pack knows what you did. They’re calling it treason.”
“It is treason. Against a system that deserved to fall.”
“The Corvus woman did this to you.”
“Willow opened my eyes. What I saw was on us.”
I hear him stand. The creak of the chair. He’s in the study—of course he is. Behind the desk, the way he always is when he’s making decisions that shape other people’s lives.
“This isn’t over,” he says. Quiet now. The cold quiet of an alpha who’s finished talking and started planning. “Not between us. Not with the network. Not with any of it.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Then we understand each other.”
“We always did, Garrett. That was the problem.”
I end the call before he can respond. The conversation is devolving into something that serves no purpose to me, aside from showing me a new side to myself.
My hands aren’t shaking. My voice didn’t crack.
The conversation I’ve been dreading since I drove south happened, and I’m still standing, and the world didn’t end.
It just got smaller. A family of four reduced to one man in a borrowed cabin on borrowed land, and the only thing in his life that matters is somewhere on this property right now, walking toward a debrief with her hair still loose and her boots unlaced, doing the work that needs doing because that’s who she is.
I think about what Garrett said. This isn’t over. He’s right. The Syndicate won’t absorb the loss of a facility quietly. And the councils are coming. Garrett’s going to be fighting on two fronts, and he doesn’t yet understand how outmatched he is on either one.
I pocket the phone. Head for the lodge. Willow needs to know about this call. Brenna needs to know.
The valley is beautiful this morning. Quiet. The mist burning off, the ridges showing through, the sound of water somewhere below. A place where things grow.
And somewhere to the south, my brother is sitting in a room full of consequences. I know him. He won’t quit. He won’t bend.
Whether that saves him or breaks him, I can’t say.