Chapter 33 #2
I find Arden outside the healers’ building, sitting on the step with Lachlan. He’s whittling something—a stick, maybe, or the beginning of a toy—and she’s watching the yard with the steady gaze of a woman who’s monitoring everything she sees. Survival habit. The kind you don’t lose.
“Walk with me,” I say.
She reads my face, touches Lachlan’s shoulder once, and falls into step beside me without a word.
We take the path toward the back room of the lodge.
I don’t rush into it. Arden doesn’t need to be handled, but she also just spent months in a cage, and the difference between an ally asking questions and a captor demanding answers can come down to tone.
“The Forresters know what happened,” I say. “Which means the chain upward knows. The man who built the network—Bern—sits on the southern council. Brenna’s taking the case to them this week.”
“This week?”
“We can’t sit on this thing. Bern will try to isolate the Forresters as a single bad actor. One rogue pack, one regional arrangement. If he succeeds, the larger system stays intact.”
“And you need me to prove it’s bigger than just the Forresters.”
“Can you?”
She opens the back room door and takes the chair across from the map. Pulls it toward her as if she’s been sitting in war rooms her whole life.
“The intake process,” she says. “Every wolf who arrived was logged the same way. Not by name; by number. Assigned on arrival, stamped on a wristband, entered into a system. Part of the form had a code for where you came from. Which pack sent you. I memorized six of them. Six different codes, six different regions. The Forresters were one. There were at least five other packs feeding wolves into our facility alone.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because the guards who transferred in from other sites already knew the system. Same codes, same terminology, same chain of reporting. A guard from the Gulf Coast facility didn’t need retraining; he walked in and started working.
That doesn’t happen with isolated operations.
That happens when someone designed it from the top down and rolled it out across every site. ”
Nadia has appeared in the doorway with her laptop. I didn’t signal her; she heard us and came. She sets up beside the map.
“Six feeder packs into one facility,” Nadia says, already typing. “If the other sites have similar numbers—”
“Then there are dozens of packs across the south funneling wolves into this thing.” Arden’s voice is steady. “And every one of those codes went up through the same chain. Same people signing off. Same money behind it. One person built this.”
The picture builds fast: shipping routes, communication nodes, the infrastructure of a network that makes the facility we burned look like a branch office.
I leave them to it. Nadia and Arden work well together, building a picture that neither could construct alone. I’ll come back for the details when they’ve had time to make the connections.
On my way across the yard, I pass Briar’s cabin.
The door is ajar, which isn’t like her. She’s sitting on the edge of her cot with something in her hands.
Small. Faded. A stuffed animal with button eyes and matted fur.
The kind of thing a child would sleep with.
I’ve seen it before; she had it when we left the burning Syndicate facility.
She hears me, and her fingers close around it. Not hiding. Containing.
“Need something?” she asks.
“No. Just checking in.”
She nods but doesn’t say anything. I don’t ask about the toy. Briar doesn’t invite questions, and whatever she’s carrying from that facility, she’ll carry it her own way.
I notice her pack is on the floor beside the cot. Not unpacked. Positioned. But I don’t think anything of it. Briar lives out of her bag the way some people live out of their pockets. Always ready to move. That’s just who she is.
I keep walking.
Late afternoon. I’m on the lodge porch, letting my thread-sense settle after hours of focus, when Conner comes around the corner of the healers’ building.
Washed, his hair damp, moving like a man who’s carrying more than he’s admitting.
He’s been with Brenna all afternoon, building the testimony that will go before the councils.
The testimony that will end his family’s name in the southern territories.
He sits beside me on the step. Close. Our arms touching.
“Mia held a spoon today,” he says. “Sable says it’s the first time she’s fed herself since the facility.”
The shift from councils and testimony to a three-year-old with a spoon shouldn’t surprise me anymore. But it does. This is what his day comes down to. Not Garrett’s call, not the threat assessment, not the political machinery grinding toward a reckoning. A child learning to grip a utensil.
“That’s good,” I say.
“She dropped it twice. Picked it up both times.” He’s watching the valley.
I take his hand.
“End of the week,” I say. “The councils. Brenna wants both of us.”
“I know. She told me.” His thumb moves across my knuckles. “I’ll be ready.”
“You know what she wants from me? She wants me standing beside her when she presents. A Corvus. A magic-blood, delivering the evidence of what purist packs did to her own people.”
“Good.” No hesitation. “Let them see you.”
“My mother did something similar once. Before I was born. Stood in front of a council alone and presented evidence that wolves were being moved off their land. She won the argument. Lost the vote.”
“What happened after?”
“The raids, eventually. The councils weren’t ready to hear it.” I watch the mist in the low ground. “This time, they won’t have a choice.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Brenna’s good at this. The political side. She spent three hours pulling my testimony apart and putting it back together. By the time she was done, I couldn’t find a hole in it. And I was the one who lived it.”
“That’s Brenna. She doesn’t leave gaps.”
“She also asked me something I wasn’t expecting.” He pauses. “She asked what Garrett would do when Bern’s name comes up. Whether he’d protect the man who built the network that paid our family, or whether he’d turn.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her Garrett doesn’t know about Bern.
Not the full picture. He thinks the arrangement was local, a regional network, nothing more.
When he finds out the payments routed through the same infrastructure as a council elder’s Syndicate communications…
” He trails off. “That’s going to hit him differently than anything else. ”
“Differently how?”
“Garrett’s not a monster, Willow. He’s a lot of things I don’t agree with, but he believed he was protecting his pack.
Finding out he was a line item in someone else’s empire—that the whole operation was never about keeping wolves safe, that it was about one man’s power—” He shakes his head.
“That’ll break something in him. Or make him dangerous. I genuinely don’t know which.”
I lean into him. His arm goes around me. We sit on the step and watch the dark come in, and the quiet between us isn’t peace. It’s the steady hum of two people who know what’s ahead and have decided to face it side by side.
Then Rook comes across the yard. Fast.
Merric is on the porch behind us. I didn’t hear him come out. He reads Rook’s approach and steps forward to meet him.
“We’ve got a problem,” Rook says. “Briar’s gone.”
“Briar is always gone, Rook,” Merric says drily.
“Her room is cleared out. Everything.”
Merric looks at Brenna, who’s appeared in the lodge doorway. She looks at me.
“When was the last time anyone saw her?” I ask.
“Training grounds, dawn,” says Rook. “She spoke to Arden about the facility’s storage records. After that, nothing.”
I’m off the step before Rook finishes. Across the yard, through Briar’s door.
The room is stripped. Bed bare. Closet empty. Maps gone. Boots, jacket, knife—gone. Clean the way Briar does everything: nothing left behind that she doesn’t intend to leave.
I stand in the empty room, and the day rearranges itself.
Her door, ajar this morning. The stuffed animal in her hands. Her fingers closing around it when she heard me coming.
Her pack beside the cot—not unpacked, I’d thought. Positioned, I understand now.
Her voice outside the burning facility, flat and aimed: “He’ll answer for every name in those boxes.”
Her conversation with Arden this morning. Not catching up. Gathering intelligence. The storage records, the confiscated belongings, the cataloguing system. She was gathering evidence.
She wasn’t settling in. She was preparing. And none of us saw it because Briar doesn’t let you see until she’s already gone.
I walk back to the porch.
“She’s gone after Garrett,” I say.
Merric swears.
“Alone?” Brenna says.
“Of course she’s alone,” Merric says.
I look at Conner. The color has left his face. He spoke to his brother this morning. He heard the fury, the calculation, the cornered alpha. He knows exactly what Briar is walking into.
Briar. Alone. In Forrester territory. Going after a cornered alpha who, as of this morning, knows his enemies by name.
But Briar is the woman who walked into a Syndicate facility alone and cleared the outer defenses without a sound.
The woman who spent nights alone in the wilderness, tracing trails that were months old.
A woman who doesn’t feel things, who doesn’t show things, who operates behind walls so thick that nobody has ever seen the woman behind them.
Briar, who took a child’s toy from a box of stolen belongings and kept it.
Who said Garrett Forrester’s name with an edge that cut.
The question isn’t whether she’ll find him.
The question is what happens when she does.
I look at Conner. He looks at me.
And somewhere to the south, Briar is moving through the dark toward a man who doesn’t know she’s coming.
The next fight is already here.