He gets in. The door closes. The truck pulls away. Heads south on the county highway. The dust settles.
I stand in the pullout. Tate is behind me, quiet. The morning sun is bright. A mockingbird sings from a fence post.
The eight-year-old’s face is still there. Behind my eyes. The comprehension in his expression. The backpack that was too big. The way he walked between his parents with the measured steps of a child who’s learned that moving carefully draws less attention.
My wolf has gone silent. Not the satisfied silence he falls into when we’re near Willow. A different silence. Heavy. The quiet of an animal that’s watching its handler do something it doesn’t agree with and has run out of ways to protest.
“Conner?” Tate’s voice. Careful.
“Yeah.”
“You good?”
I turn the truck on. Pull out. Head back toward the compound. The county road stretches north, straight and empty.
“I’m good,” I say.
Tate doesn’t ask again. We drive in silence. The morning gets brighter. The hills get sharper. Everything looks the same as it did two hours ago: the trees, the rock formations, the fence lines, the road. My territory. My home. The land I’ve protected my whole life.
It all looks the same.
It just doesn’t feel like it.
The bracelet on my wrist is warm from my skin. I wore it today the same way I wear it every day—without thinking, without ceremony, the symbol of a grief that shaped everything I am.
I think about Maren. Fourteen. The ward that killed her. The magic that no one could control. The reason we do what we do.
Then I think about the boy. The backpack. The look on his face.
Maren didn’t choose to be in the path of that ward. That kid didn’t choose to carry magic in his blood.
Neither of them had a choice.
I drive through the compound gate. Park. Tate gets out, glances at me, decides not to say anything, and walks toward the bunkhouse. I don’t follow immediately.
The birds are still singing. The morning is still bright. My wolf is still silent.
And for the first time in ten years, the words I’ve said to myself after every relocation—this keeps people safe, this is what we do, this is right—don’t come when I reach for them.
They’re there. I can feel them. Sitting where they’ve always sat, in the place I built for them after Maren died.
They just won’t come out of my mouth.
Chapter 16
Willow
Nearly two weeks. That’s how long it’s taken me to lose the plot entirely.
I’m sitting on my bed at the motel, staring at the wall, and the inventory keeps running: I’ve slept with Conner Forrester twice. Joined him at a barbecue. Eaten his mother’s cornbread. Let him take me to a place he hasn’t shown anyone since his sister died. Sat beside him at Dutch’s and listened to him talk about water and cedar and land as if we were two ordinary people with nothing between us but coffee.
And last night—last night, I stood in this parking lot with my jeans unbuttoned and his mouth on my neck and almost let it happen again, right here, against his truck, while Briar was alone in the hills doing the work I should have been doing.
I’ve laughed more in two weeks than I have in two years. And I’ve accomplished less.
The mission isn’t stalled. Briar’s seen to that. She’s been in the hills every day, tracking scent, pushing further south, while I’ve been sitting in diners and parking lots, falling for a man whose pack may have destroyed my kind.
And last night’s interruption left more than frustration. The phone call. The way his face changed—the man disappearing, the enforcer surfacing.Dawes found something on the south boundary.He said it like it was routine. But the urgency in his voice when he saidhow manytold me it wasn’t routine. Something happened on the Forrester boundary, and Conner left my arms to go deal with it.