“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 regionalnetwork, 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.