“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.”