I don’t know what. The not-knowing gnaws.
The door opens just after one. Later than Briar said she’d be, which isn’t like her.
She stands in the doorway, and something in her face stops me cold. Not anger. Something worse. The look of a woman who’s confirmed something she was hoping to be wrong about.
She comes in. Drops her pack. Doesn’t sit down. She’s been out all night and all morning, and whatever she found is sitting behind her eyes with a weight I can see from across the room.
“What happened?” I ask, getting to my feet.
“Sit down.”
“Just tell me.”
She reaches into her jacket and pulls out her phone. Flips to a photo. Holds it out.
The image is taken from a distance: grainy, zoomed, shot through tree branches. But it’s clear enough. A dark truck parked on the edge of a gravel road. And behind it, a sedan with the door open. A woman climbing out of the backseat with a child in her arms. A man beside her. Another child walking between them with an oversized backpack.
And standing at the dark truck, his body language unmistakable even in a blurry photo—broad shoulders, strongfeatures, the posture of a man directing the operation—is Conner.
“This was this morning,” Briar says. “I’ve been watching the junction for three days. It’s the chokepoint—the only place where the corridor connects to a road wide enough for a vehicle transfer. I knew if anyone was going to move wolves through, it would happen there.” She pauses. “This morning, it did.”
I stare at the photo. The woman and the child. The older boy. Conner’s shape at the edge of the frame.
“He drove them from a ravine south of the compound,” Briar continues. “The family followed his truck in their own car. At the junction, a second truck arrived. Unmarked, blue, plates I couldn’t read from the ridge. Two men. The family got out of their car and into the blue truck. Left the sedan behind. The truck went south.”
“And Conner?”
“He supervised the transfer. Start to finish.”
The phone is shaking in my hand. Not the phone—my hand.
“How old is the kid?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“Eight. Maybe nine.”
Eight.
I set the phone on the nightstand before I shatter it.
“There’s more,” Briar says. She pulls out her map and flattens it on the bed. The lines I’ve been watching her build for nearly two weeks have changed. The fragmentary traces from her first days of tracking have been connected, extended. What I’m looking at now isn’t scattered evidence. It’s a route.
“The corridor runs here.” She traces the line. “North to south, through the hills east of the compound. Follows the ridge for about three miles, drops into the creek bed, and continues south to the junction.” Her finger stops at the pullout in the photo. “The scent evidence along the corridor is layered. Multiplepassages. Ravenclaw signatures mixed with escort scents—local wolves, moving alongside them.”
“How many passages?”
“Impossible to say exactly. But the corridor is worn, Willow. This route has been used repeatedly over a long period. This isn’t a one-off.”
“So it’s definitely them. Him.”
Briar looks at me. Holds the look. “The scent markers along the corridor match the ones I’ve been picking up around the compound perimeter since we arrived. Same wolves.”
“And the occupants of the unmarked truck?”
“Dressed as civilians, but from the way they held themselves, I’d put my money on Syndicate.”
Oh my God.
There it is. All of it, at once.