I set my plate down because my hand has started to shake, and I’d rather break my own wrist than let anyone here see it.
“Hey.” Conner’s beside me. Close. Not touching. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just warm. Mind if we walk?”
“Come on. I’ll show you the south pasture. It’s quieter.”
We walk away from the gathering, past the bunkhouses, along a fence line that runs toward a ridge. The noise of the barbecue fades. My hands stop shaking.
“The toast,” he says after a while. “That threw you.”
He’s perceptive. Dangerously so. I need to deflect without lying. Lies compound, and I’m already carrying too many.
“I’ve spent time in a lot of small towns. Moved around a lot.” I keep my voice level. “The ones that talk about purity tend to mean something specific by it.”
“And you want to know if we do.”
“Do you?”
He walks for a few steps without answering. The fence posts tick past. A hawk circles overhead, riding the thermals off the ridge.
“My family’s been traditional for a long time,” he says. “We believe in clean bloodlines. Strong pack structure. Wolves being wolves, not something mixed with things that don’t belong.”
“Things that don’t belong.” I keep my voice even. Neutral. The outsider making conversation, not the Corvus wolf whose blood is singing with the magic his pack considers contamination.
“Magic.” He says it directly. No euphemism. “Some bloodlines carry it. Old magic, wolf magic, whatever you want to call it. It’s unstable. Dangerous. Wolves who carry it can’t truly control what it does.” He pauses. “People have died because of it.”
“People you knew?”
The pause is long enough that I hear the answer before he gives it. “My sister,” he says. “A stray wolf with magic lost control.” He touches the bracelet on his wrist.
“That’s horrible,” I murmur. Because it is.
“That’s why we do what we do. Not because we hate anyone. Because we’ve seen what happens when magic goes wrong.”
The sincerity in his voice is the worst part. He means it. He believes he’s protecting people. The ideology isn’t abstract for him; it’s built on a dead girl and scars that cut deeper than flesh.
And I carry the very thing he fears. Right now, standing beside him, my magic hums under my skin like a current. Quiet,contained, but alive. If he knew, he’d look at me the way those women near the food table talked about mixed families. With disgust. With the calm certainty that I’m a threat he needs to manage.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” I say. And I mean it. The loss is real. What he built on top of it is wrong, but the loss is real.
“It was a long time ago.”
Which is what people say when it wasn’t long enough.
We walk to the ridge. Below us, the compound lights are coming on. String lights along the pavilion. The band starting up again. Families settling into the evening with the unhurried ease of people who feel safe.
I should be down there, gathering intelligence. Memorizing the compound layout, noting the security patterns, counting the buildings I haven’t identified yet. That’s why I’m here. That’s the mission.
Instead, I’m standing on a ridge with a man who just told me exactly why he’d hand me over to his pack if he knew what I was, and I’m thinking about the way his voice softened when he spoke about his sister.
God, you’re such a fucking fool, Willow.
This is the problem with getting close to a source. You start seeing the person. And the person makes it harder to remember that you’re using them.
Because Iamusing him. Not just for the pull or the sex or the way my wolf feels around him. I’m using his access, his trust, his willingness to talk to me. Every conversation, every coffee, every touch… It’s intelligence-gathering dressed as intimacy. Briar approves. Brenna understands.
That doesn’t make it feel any less like betrayal.