“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 saycollateral. 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 answersto. “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 readscompromised, 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. Asupply 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.”