Chapter 1
Willow
The truck is loaded. Two duffel bags, a cooler, weapons wrapped in canvas, and a burner phone with six numbers in it. Everything we need for a trip that might take a week, or might take a month, or might end with both of us in the ground.
I lean against the tailgate and look at the ranch.
Late fall in the Ozarks turns the valley amber. The hills are a wash of gold and rust, the oaks holding the last of their color while the hickories have already gone bare. The lodge sits low against the hillside, lights on in the kitchen where Greta is probably feeding someone who doesn’t need feeding. The new barn is solid. The cabins are warm. The fences are strong.
Two years I held this place together. Fed thirty wolves on nothing. Patched roofs, stood watch, buried the ones we couldn’t save, and pretended I knew what I was doing when half the time I was running on rage and instinct and the stubborn refusal to let the Ravenclaw Pack die on my watch.
Now Brenna’s back. Merric’s here. The pack has an alpha pair that actually knows what they’re doing, and the ranch feels more like home than it has since my aunt walked into a fire and didn’t come out.
So, of course, I’m leaving.
“You done staring, or should I get comfortable?”
Briar is already in the passenger seat. Door open. Boots on the dash. She’s cleaning a knife with a cloth she keeps in her jacket, working the blade with the absent attention of someone who’s done it ten thousand times. Slim, dark-haired, gray-eyed. Pretty in a way that makes you think of scissors—fine and sharp and designed for purpose.
She’s not mine. She’s Merric’s. One of his Frostbourne wolves, sent south with me because Brenna asked, and Merric doesn’t refuse Brenna much these days. Or anything at all. I don’t know Briar well. What I know is that she can track a wolf across dry stone, she sleeps three hours a night, and she’s never once asked me how I’m feeling.
I appreciate that more than she’ll ever know.
“Coming.” I push off the tailgate and walk around to the driver’s side.
Cameron is on the lodge porch, sitting on the top step with a book he’s not reading. Seventeen and already too old for his age. He watches me cross the yard with eyes that are all Brenna, and I see him taking in the truck, the gear, the direction I’m headed. He knows I’m going. I told him last night.
He lifts his chin. I lift mine back.
We don’t need words. Cam and I have a language that’s older than conversation. Two Corvus wolves who survived the same winters, ate from the same thin stores, sat together when his magic flared and the fire came out of his skin and someone had to be there to talk him through it. He’s my cousin. Myresponsibility. And now Brenna and Merric will keep him safe, which means I can go.
I climb in. Start the engine. Briar doesn’t look up from her knife.
We leave. No fanfare. No teary farewells. I said my goodbyes last night.
The ranch road winds down through the valley and joins the county blacktop heading south. I roll the window down. The air is cool, smelling of leaf rot, creek water, and the faint mineral edge of limestone. My wolf stretches inside my chest, interested in the scent change, the new direction. She’s been restless for weeks. Cooped up now that the pack doesn’t need me running things. She wants a job. So do I.
Twenty minutes down the road, my phone rings. I put it on speaker.
“You’re on the road.” Brenna’s voice is clipped and clear. She tracked us leaving.
“Just passed the county line.”
“Good. I want you to check in every forty-eight hours. Use the second burner if the first is compromised. The dead-drop in Waco is still active; I refreshed it last month. The one in Austin may be burned. Don’t use it unless you have no other option.”
I commit it to memory because Brenna doesn’t repeat herself. “Got it.”
“Your primary contact in central Texas is a woman called Margaux. She runs a feed store in a town called Eldridge, a few hours out from where the families were last tracked. She’s human. Married to a wolf. She’s been in my network for eight years, and she’s reliable. She’ll have supplies and local intelligence. During our last call, she’d picked up word of a family moving through the Hill country. She’ll have more details by now.”
“And if she’s compromised?”
A pause. The kind that means Brenna has already considered this and doesn’t love the answer. “Then you’re on your own until I can route you to someone else. Don’t trust anyone who isn’t on the list.”
“I know.”
“Willow.” Her tone shifts. Still professional. But underneath it, something else: concern. “These are traditional pack territories. The wolves down there don’t think like us. They don’t live like us. Magic-blooded wolves are not welcome, and some of those packs enforce that with more than words. You cannot let them know what you are.”
“I know, Aunt Brenna.”